Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes

WRIGHT, T. P. (1936). Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes. Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, 3(4), 122-128.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1936

Volume

3

Issue

4

Pages

122-128

DOI

10.2514/8.155

DOI registrant

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Link

https://doi.org/10.2514/8.155

Cited from

disaster_management, economics_finance, synthesized

Cited by

7 citations across 7 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Diminishing Incremental Gains
  • Failure mode: a project is abandoned at an early stage because "we've plateaued," when in fact the current regime is still ramping up toward higher productivity, as Wright (1936) first quantified for airframe production where unit cost fell predictably with cumulative output before tapering.
• Increasing Returns
  • … foregrounds the supply-side channel where Smith (1776) located rising productivity in the division of labor, and learning_curve_effects foregrounds the experience channel that Wright (1936) first quantified in airplane manufacturing — all three are the same four-role pattern under different reinforcement channels.
• Learning Curve Effects
  • Learning curve effects name the structural pattern whereby the unit cost, time, or error rate of an activity falls predictably as cumulative experience — total units produced or repetitions performed — accumulates, typically following a power law in which each doubling of cumulative volume yields a roughly constant fractional improvement, a regularity T. P. Wright (1936) first quantified in observing that airframe labor-hours declined a fixed percentage with each doubling of cumulative output.

Mechanisms

• Experience Curve Review
  • The Experience Curve Review plots cost against cumulative cells produced (not calendar time or annual volume) and finds a stable slope: each doubling of lifetime output cuts unit cost by a consistent percentage

    This sourceShows a cumulative-output learning relation with a roughly constant percentage reduction in labor or cost as cumulative output doubles.

• Learning Capture and Reuse Cycle
  • Its strength is converting a workforce's episodic cleverness into a rising floor — the deliberate way to ride the experience curve, where cumulative practice keeps lowering the cost of the next unit of similar work rather than leaving that decline to chance.

    This sourceShows that the unit cost of similar production work declines systematically as cumulative production experience grows.

• Learning-Curve Dashboards
  • It is the empirical test of the experience-curve thesis on which so much first-mover confidence rests.

    This sourceEmpirically relates aircraft production cost to accumulated production experience.

• Time-and-Motion Study
  • Its failure mode is that a standard time is a snapshot, and on a genuine learning curve the achievable time keeps falling with cumulative experience — a standard frozen at the first study quietly goes stale, so today's "100% of standard" is tomorrow's slack.

    This sourceShows that average labor cost declines with increasing production quantity, including through worker proficiency gained with practice.

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