U will notice that this plane is being built outside of the USA. The entire project has been OUTSOURCED!.
Of course I noticed. The auto excerpt feature of Free Republic's thread posting web page only posts text from the beginning of a story. I manually excerpted it and put the last paragraph at the end.
from the full article:
"Evergreen, the builder of the aircraft, is a joint venture of EVA Air and General Electric and part of Taiwan's Evergreen Group."
Evergreen is a Taiwaneese company. It is the largest international sea shipping company. So using airplanes is a natural extension.
Another way to get small valuable goods from over there, to over here.
The largest EXPORTs from the US today are EMPTY ship cargo containers, and scrap steel.
Note they started with a USED Boeing plane (perhaps just short of scrap aluminum?).
A lot of the engineering of the cargo hold and tail of the plane is being done in Russia under Boeing's supervision.