131–140 of 175 posts
How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every…
> unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a 777 doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated a…
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Plus everything important is always written down. It’s more true in aviation than anywhere else (except maybe space flight), but still.
And if it's written down, it's accurate. 100. Percent. Accurate. /s
A buddy of mine is the son of a United Airlines mechanic who was fairly high up in the organization. When his dad passed United gave him a stack of blank wax tickets. His son could write the destination on them and fly for free. Near the end of the stack they were largely ornamental as he could just tell them where he wanted to go and they would print a proper ticket. But still, it was a rather classy way to honor hi…
I haven't heard the term before. What's a 'wax ticket'?
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/afacwa/pages/687/attac... (page 318)
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> I don't think you can learn how to work in a machine shop safely from a book. Or recognize when a complex design is heading towards being unworkable. This strikes me as something one learns very slowly over time. Safety takes time to internalize after close calls or seeing people get hurt. Same with complexity, it takes going through project after project to get a gut feeling for what works and what doesn't.
Parents also develop the ability to see several seconds into the future with regard to their toddlers and small children.
How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every…
I work in a mid sized engineering organization, and the older engineers (and engineer-adjacent people like me) mentor the younger ones all the time. One thing that can't be codified in procedures is what I call "situational awareness" for lack of a better term. I don't think you can learn how to work in a machine shop safely from a book. Or recognize when a complex design is heading towards being unworkable. In my or…
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> but you can't fly a plan that 'missing a part' It’s a great story, but I assure you there is a pretty high percentage of airplanes flying with missing parts and systems placarded as INOP in both military and civilian aviation.
Before you can placard something as INOP, you must determine whether the manufacturer and certifying authority have included that part in the Minimum Equipment List or Dispatch Deviation List. Mechanics do both get to determine this at their own discretion. Hence the call to the manufacturer for clarification on the necessity of said pin. To reiterate, you CANNOT fly an airplane with an undocumented missing part. If…
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“Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t software development one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a web service doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated and republished to all developers worldwide.” Just making a point t…
The joke about software developers refusing to enter an airplane running their own code dates back at least 30 years. Software engineering is unique in STEM in that it has nearly zero regulations. Nobody keeps anybody accountable for quality and there are never any legal consequences. No other STEM jobs is like that, usually there are thousand hoops to jump through to do anything non-standard, but in software there's…
A Jira log is not part of a Quality Management System (QMS). An aircraft maintenance log is. If you fake data in the QMS, software or not, for a regulated industry, I can assure you that it won't be taken lightly by the regulators.
Try forging the software validation test records for that airplane's flight control system and see what happens.
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> unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a 777 doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated a…
I implore everyone to take on a nut and bolts (or resistors and transistors) hardware project sometime in their life to learn what it's like working on "Mother Nature OS". I guess a more relatable way of conveying this is that you can have the recipe from a michelin star chef, but you're still not going to get anywhere close to michelin star quality.
For quite a while, he hated having to test on real hardware because all sorts of failure modes that he couldn't predict: belts stretching, mechanisms hitting each other or not lining up properly and losing position, etc. kept happening and interfering with his nice "this will only take 15 minutes to test" estimates, making it an all-afternoon affair.
OTOH, it was that unpredictability and having to deal with weird stuff that I liked about programming embedded systems.
How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every…
Some people do a lot as least. Forrest Addy has a massive library of posts that are still the top results on Google for just about any machining problem imaginable.
I remember posting on PM about 15 years ago asking how to fix a mistake I kept making and he gently smacked me on the head and basically said just learn to do it right in the first place. Which was really the only good answer!