Kunsan Airbase’s New Runway Stop Lights

Tags: Kunsan AB

• JAFO
  2:50 am on January 31st, 2009 1

  Where is Stars & Stripes (and AFN) asking tough questions when you need them?

  There is no combination of 30 cent LEDs, plastic boxes, a few 74xx series chips and a twenty dollar off-the-shelf made-in-Korea red warning bell that should cost more than a few hundred dollars at full price.

  This should immediately raise a red flag to anybody who is interested in stopping fraud, waste and abuse (if there is anyone).

  This is more shocking than $150 light fixtures and $400 LED lights.

  Am I the only one who finds this irritating?

  Reply

• Contracor
  7:57 am on February 1st, 2009 2

  Most costs are probably in labor. There are 19 installed around the airfield, perimeter road and along access points to the instrument landing system critical areas. Three zones are controlled by the air traffic control tower. Labor costs, trenching, wiring etc., are included in pricing. Construction isn't cheap to have a seamless system integrated into an ATC complex.

  Reply

• GI_Korea
  9:01 am on February 1st, 2009 3

  The AFN guys should explain this then because when people hear a $650,000 price tag and they just show a simple stop light, it makes people wonder.

  Reply

• JAFO
  9:37 pm on February 1st, 2009 4

  Contractor,

  I'm sure you are right. That, of course, is the problem and not the explanation.

  Since we have determined the lights themselves are excessively cheap, the rest must be labor costs, trenching and wiring.

  A thousand guys digging for an hour of PT instead of doing push-ups save, roughly, a hundred percent of associated trenching costs. (This applies to cutting grass and other things, too). If it is determined that digging ditches is too advanced for average Air Force boys, we can ask what the CE guys and all their expensive equipment are doing.

  They don't have a $2000 riding trencher and some one-hour-of-training airman basic who can drive it? Bullcorn.

  Wire costs? I can buy miles of the stuff for a few hundred dollars. With the global fall in demand and collapse of copper, it is less than half the price of six months ago.

  From an engineering standpoint, these lights are about as basic and crappy as they can be. There is no stainless and there are no custom parts. The construction is cheaply-made pipe and folded metal stock with off-the-shelf components and no machined items (which is a very-acceptable manufacturing method, at the appropriate price) . However, the bell isn't located in even a rudimentary weatherproof housing (generally, the solenoid is exposed in the back and any sealed cover dampens the sound where it contacts the bell). There appears to be a wire dangling loosely under the bell.

  “We have been working diligently for over ten years to get these lights installed.” – Captain Scott Denny

  This quote was accepted with a straight face by the reporters and the viewing audience? Am I surrounded by idiots?

  Kunsan did fine without a blinking light for (more than) ten years and nobody was caught unaware of a large chunk of loud, flashing, moving metal in the flattest, most open and obstruction-free piece of land in the region. I believe it. Not all train track crossings or school crosswalks have warning lights. Generally, people do just fine.

  Suddenly,. in the midst of a huge global financial crisis, an expensive and unending two-fronted war, crippled federal and state governments sinking rapidly into runaway non-productive debt, nation-wide cuts in necessary services, Do More With Less, and a floundering federal reserve printing non-stop inflationary money to cover pressing obligations, Kunsan has to spend $650,000 for lights of questionable necessity.

  Sixty-five thousand would have raised my eyebrows. Six HUNDRED and fifty thousand raises my pitchfork.

  Let's run a quick cost estimate.

  A senior engineer to design it. Let's say he spends a year and does no other project (even though flashing lights are an Introduction to Basic Electronics 101 project). 70 grand? Lets say a hundred grand with a helper to get coffee and run down to Radio Shack for $20 worth of LEDs and extra soldier for the prototype. Digging trenches and running wire? A hundred guys could dig a lot in a week, I bet. Let's hire union guys and pay 'em a thousand dollars each for a week's work. We are up to two hundred grand. Nineteen lights? Well, to make the math easy, how about five thousand dollars each and $5000 for enough Rust-olium to paint them in pretty reds and yellows. That's three hundred grand. Wire? What the heck. Another hundred grand for miles and miles of gold-plated Monster Cable with ultra-duty connectors and wire ties (oops, they didn't use 'em). Nineteen bags of radiation-resistant concrete for those tiny slabs at $5000 each and another $5000 for iridium-plated lag bolts with custom 13/17 left-handed threads. That's five hundred thousand. Finally, a hundred thousand in small, unmarked bills in a secret bank account for the colonel in charge of pushing this contract through.

  So, my question is, where did the last $50,000 go?

  Any ideas?

  Reply

• JAFO
  9:18 pm on February 4th, 2009 5

  Ha ha! Somebody printed my above post and showed it to me at work. They had no idea it was me that wrote it. What could I say?

  My only suggestion was that a hundred grand would buy at least 20 miles of Monster Cable and any extra should be wrapped around the tower to make one hell of a Testla coil.

  Is there anybody out there at Kunsan who can post some detailed pictures of these lights so we can further over-analyze them? I see so much of this fraud, waste and abuse at work. I just dare not say anything.

  At least I feel like I am doing some good to discuss this.

  Reply

 

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