Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But now engineering seems to be : let's ask my computing power what is the good design, with little further questioning. I see this quite often at the undergrad level. Even for the simplest problem that can be solved with a pencil and a couple of calculations, many students launch their finite element software and blindly trust the results, even if it is telling them something obviously wrong, like orders of magnit…
I don't find that particularly surprising. Engineering students want to learn how to build machines to find solutions to everything, so it's intuitive that they would place a high confidence in a solution provided by a machine.
“I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
71–80 of 313 posts
Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brilliant engineers are still there. We haven’t gotten stupider as a species in 30 years. It’s the economics that changed. As people say “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. First we started going cheap on the materials. Now we are going cheap on the engineers too. Why pay a senior “brilliant” engineer $$$$ when a fresh out of college “average” engineer can write the “same piece of code” for $$
I think it may be that brilliant engineers still exist somewhere, but I suspect they're less likely to go into aerospace than in the 50s, 60s or 70s. Heck or even the 40s. Immediately after the war aerospace was red hot - there were countless countries and companies putting out new jet designs - both commercial and military. The competition and pace was intense and there was quite some cachet and public interest in a…
Firstly, from 1903-1968 aerospace was in a period of exponentially improving performance (range, speed, altitude) comparable to Moore's Law. But from the mid-60s onwards the rapid improvements stopped, as developments hit hard limits imposed by material science and thermodynamics: it's hard to get a material much stronger than carbon fibre or titanium alloy, it's ridiculously hard to go faster in air (drag increases faster than the square of speed: if you throw more energy at the problem via your engines it comes out in the form of friction-induced heating).
Secondly, there have been huge incremental improvements since 1968. Consider the 737 series. The 737-100 had a maximum range of 1540 nautical miles on 17.86 metric tonnes of fuel; today's 737MAX-10 can do 3850nm on 25.94 tonnes of fuel: it's 72% more fuel-efficient. It's also gone from 118 to 204 seats, so about the same upgrade is passenger capacity. The cargo capacity has almost doubled, too.
This being HN, the point of comparison should be an Intel-cpu laptop circa 2009 with an equivalent laptop today. The headline clock speed is probably similar (stuck around 2.4GHz), as is the number of hardware cores. The modern laptop probably has more RAM and more storage, but only by a factor of 2x or 4x. But it has double or triple the battery life, 4x or 8x the pixels on screen, a screamingly fast SSD instead of a rotating-platter drive, and a GPU that the OS can offload a chunk of work onto other than simply accelerated graphics. It looks disappointingly similar, but if you could give your 2009-self your 2019 laptop they wouldn't be in a hurry to give it back again.
There have also been huge improvements in overall safety, the 737MAX MCAS problem aside; compare accident rates today with accident rates in the 1980s, let alone the 1950s if you want an eye-opener. (Of 1010 Boeing 707s delivered, there have been 173 hull losses in accidents.)
Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
But modern firepower between two nuclear nations only requires a few nuclear facilities, not the sort of industrial complex that made the difference in ww2. Good intentions of not using nukes don't really matter, as the conflict would invariably escalate as one of the parties takes over. Which is why this noise of direct war between US and Russia or US and China isn't really credible. A supply chain war is more credi…
There are more than a billion people in China, most of which don't have a particularly great standard of living. The domestic market in China is massive and has huge potential for growth. I think China would be fine without the rest of the world.
Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
#74"I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period and I can absolutely guarantee this happened." was in response to this comment: "I would be very surprised if in a few years from today a bunch of engineers don't testify that ample of warning was given to management about this. " Reddit doesn't make it easy to find what they replied to.
Yes it does. Just click on the link labeled "parent" at the bottom of any comment.
Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Original MCAS system used only 1 AOA sensor and switched back and forth between the two after every flight. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea??? Let's make it 10x more difficult to detect that there is a problem.
I was wondering the same. What is the logic behind this setup? That basically means that it is no better than having one sensor. Because if any one of them breaks, you have broken sensor active on next or following flight. Also I recall there was something said about Lion Air crash that the crew on the day before experienced some flight control problems which was not communicated to the crew involved in crash? Did th…
Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes, online flight trackers estimate the registration prior to the flight and they usually have the serial number as well (otherwise you can look it up on airfleets, plane spotters etc). For some flights it's easy to estimate the registration yourself (if the only plane available is a current inbound flight). But generally, you won't get that info more than a day in advance. Airlines won't even know it more tha…
But typically the same types of planes fly the same routes, I would imagine.
And if you want delivery year of the aircraft with an airline operating multiple aircraft of that type, you're probably going to have to know serial/tail number which might not be possible to determine until very late on.
Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brilliant engineers are still there. We haven’t gotten stupider as a species in 30 years. It’s the economics that changed. As people say “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. First we started going cheap on the materials. Now we are going cheap on the engineers too. Why pay a senior “brilliant” engineer $$$$ when a fresh out of college “average” engineer can write the “same piece of code” for $$
> “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”. Okay maybe, but we have been saying this literally forever .
Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
#78He doesn't like the Dreamliner too! Eeek! That was the best value for crossing the Atlantic. Damn, this is gonna haunt me now, I liked flying those :(
Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
#79My view of aircraft engineering has certainly changed since the 737 stuff came out. You always get told software engineers are a bunch of cowboys compared to aircraft people, because they have to put everything through a bunch of rigourous tests. I asked a friend who trains commercial pilots about it, and to my surprise he told me the processes to get things certified are political and hand-wavy.
I know software is bad. But using the same airframe from the 60's and just strapping bigger engines to it until you have to move the nacelle and alter flight characteristics seems like a cowboy move also.
This was Boeing optimizing very hard at "how do we get better fuel economy while keeping the same type rating". In general, I'm totally in favor of them doing this sort of optimization, since pilot training is legitimately a big expense.
(In this case it clearly went wrong, both in that MCAS was an unsafe design and that the FAA should not have allowed it to keep the same type rating.)
Re: “I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period”
#80Btw, the new "fix" for the MCAS has just been announced and discussed by a 40-year experienced pilot [1]. Turns out that while we shouldn't be doing armchair analysis and assuming the worst of the engineering, management and executive team; the software fix released appears to be rather elementary and MCAS should have been designed with these safety checks in the first place. Why it wasn't is a huge concern and we wo…
> 1. Use inputs from both AOA sensors, if they disagree by 5.5 degrees, disable MCAS. Great, and now you have the other problem the MCAS was supposed to mitigate (the tendency of the MAX to do backflips).