I couldn't agree more about the Faux accuracy! Two other thoughts. The business about putting altitude or depth on the y-axis is common practice in many physical sciences fields like oceanography (see example at http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/images/temperature_depth_jpg_image.html), limnology and atmospheric science. I always find these charts hard to think about because they go against the standard practice (I'm an ecologist), but I suppose if you spend your days looking at them they start to make sense. The line joining a series of solutions reminds me of an "efficiency frontier" in economics, where you are trying to figure out how many different possible solutions compare. Good solutions are on the boundary of the cost-output space. This might be relevant if the report was arguing for an investment of say, 10^8 dollars in the Aurora design. Then the performance of Boeing's best alternative isn't relevant - only the performance of off the shelf solutions.