I'm waiting (again) for a computer render so thought I'd take a shot at writing down something that's been nagging at me.
I’ve been thinking about the “FAA Grounds 787” thread and it’s been a very interesting demonstration of where the world is going these days. And it’s actually somewhat disheartening.
I’ve printed off a bunch of the comments from the 787 thread and shown them to some people I know on the program. Their reaction has been interesting and is what has gotten me thinking about the subject in a somewhat different light.
And that is, to put it in a nutshell, that ignorance has become the dominant influence on what happens these days. Not just with airplanes. But almost everything that is big, complicated, expensive, and not easy to do. Here locally we’ve had massive delays, bad decisions, and staggering cost over-runs on everything from new sewage treatment plants to bridges to tunnels to light rail systems. Ridiculous amounts of money are wasted and projects that used to take months to do drag on for years.
The aerospace industry is about solving problems. From Wilbur and Orville up through today, the whole endeavor is based on solving problems. Because when you want to first simply fly, and then fly faster, then higher and farther and carry more, and then fly quieter and pollute less you are confronted by a staggering array of problems. That, in my opinion, is the real definition of the jobs our engineers and assemblers do--- they solve problems.
Everybody whines about air fares. Probably everybody on TF who’s gloating about the 787 battery problem bitches about the cost to go visit Aunt Sally in Cleveland. They want to fly cheaper and cheaper. Competition has driven the airlines to cut costs to the bone to retain market share and half the time they still lose money. They, in turn, pass that demand to cut costs on to the manufacturers. They want planes that are cheaper to buy, and if that’s not possible they damn well want planes that are way cheaper to operate. So they can continue to entice you to take a flight when you want to visit Aunt Sally.
So what do the manufactures do? What they’ve always done, because this pressure from our customers to cut operating costs is nothing new. We design planes to be more efficient and less costly to own and operate.
Efficiency takes a lot of forms. It’s not just weight or how much fuel the engines burn. It’s how well the plane makes use of everything--- materials, wiring, computers, electricity, water. It’s how much bang for the buck the airline can get out of its flight crews, how efficiently they can do their jobs. It’s how quickly the plane can troubleshoot itself and tell the mechanics exactly what to do, and how fast the mechanics can do it and get the plane back in the air. Because a plane only makes money when it's in the air.
And accomplishing every one of these things means problems to overcome. More and more of them, in fact, as we continue to eke out an increased return on every drop of fuel burned and every hour a pilot or mechanic is on the job.
Electricity is playing a huge role in helping solve these problems. Window shades add weight, and worse, they add maintenance time and cost because they stick, jam, and break. So we’ve eliminated the window shades on the 787 by using dimming window technology. No shades, no weight, and most important, no more fixing them. That’s just one teeny tiny example of how electricity is helping to meet the continuing demand of our customers for lighter, cheaper, more efficient.
Batteries are a must in an airplane and always have been. They have been used forever to provide emergency power for the flight deck displays and other critical components in the event of a total loss of power from the engines. They are also needed to start the auxilliary power unit, which on a B29 was a Briggs and Stratton gasoline generator and on the modern commercial transport is a little jet engine.
As the demand for battery power grew, so did the batteries or the number of them. And anyone who has hauled an 8D or whatever out of the engine room of their boat knows batteries ain’t light.
Turbofan engines used to be air started. Plug in a ground cart to provide air, get one engine going, it provides air to start the rest of the engines. The engines also provided air to run the air conditioning , heating, and pressurization systems. But bleeding air from the engine means there’s that much less power generating thrust. So one of the goals on the 787 was to eliminate the whole bleed air thing. More major problems to solve, but the engineers did it.
But engines still have to be started and the cabin still needs to be pressurized. They are, using electricity now, instead of that power-robbing bleed air that made it even more expensive for the airlines to carry you to see Aunt Sally in Cleveland.
Which means------ better batteries. Batteries that are a hell of a lot more powerful. But loading the plane up with NiCads or whatever was used before wouldn’t work because it would defeat a lot of what the engineers were trying to accomplish with the plane to meet our customers' demands for lighter, cheaper, more efficient. They needed a huge amount of battery power with no weight gain and preferably a weight loss, and not batteries that would build up a “memory” or do the other things that older types of batteries do.
So another problem to solve. And the solution seemed pretty obvious. Lithium batteries, for all the reasons that lithium batteries have become the norm in everything from mobile phones to portable drills to our video camera batteries. They are such an advantage over the older kinds of batteries it’s not even worth making a comparison. But….. as we all know now…. lithium battery technology is not quite where we thought it was.
And here is where the ignorance comes in.
In the aerospace world, this is just another problem to be figured out and solved. The airframe and engine manufacturers have faced far, far more challenging and difficult problems in the past. Wings that didn’t work right, engines that didn’t work right, window frames that didn’t work right in the case of the Comet, tails that came off, engines that burst into flame for “no reason” in the case of the B-29, and on and on and on. And every time, the engineers figured out what was happening and then figured out how to make it not happen again. That’s what aerospace engineers do.
But today, they are hampered by a much bigger problem than things like batteries and exploding engines. They are hampered by ignorance on the part of the media, and subsequently the public, which clamors for instant fixes (same as they clamor for instant gratification in everything else they do). On this forum alone there are people like Sunchaser who gloat at the specter of Boeing failing and FF who lives in an aviation world that ceased to exist decades ago. They, like pretty much most of the public, cannot even conceive of what it’s like to create a new airplane like the 787. And to be fair because this ignorance is an equal-opportunity pain in the ass, the A350. Nevertheless, they glom onto stuff they see in the media, written or broadcast for the most part by people equally ignorant, and in their blatherings they simply reinforce the ignorance.
But as ignorant as they are, these are the voices that tend to sway everything from public opinion to government response. The government, of course, is made up of people who are equally clueless on these subjects, be it aviation or tunnel boring or laying railroad track. So since they know no better, they simply go along with the ignorance and act on it.
Which is why, I believe, nothing gets done anymore with any degree of efficiency and cost effectiveness. We’re reached the point where the ignorant are calling the shots.
I don’t say any of this because I don’t think the 787 should have been grounded. The battery issue is serious---- there is nobody at Boeing who doesn’t think so---- and a solution needs to be found. The new president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Ray Conner who started his career working on the flightline, cancelled the big annual senior leadership meeting last week 15 minutes in and sent everyone back to work to figure out the battery solution.
But the pressure is still on us from our customers to find a solution that will help them compete and knock a buck or two off your ticket price to go visit Aunt Sally. That reality never changes.
And it’s what our engineers do. They solve problems and this is just another one. There will be more, and there will be bigger ones. Maybe on this plane, maybe on the next one. Or maybe even on an earlier one. But they take them on as they come up.
The sad thing is that fewer and fewer people understand this which in turn makes it more and more difficult to solve problems because the bozos keep getting in the way.
I’ve been thinking about the “FAA Grounds 787” thread and it’s been a very interesting demonstration of where the world is going these days. And it’s actually somewhat disheartening.
I’ve printed off a bunch of the comments from the 787 thread and shown them to some people I know on the program. Their reaction has been interesting and is what has gotten me thinking about the subject in a somewhat different light.
And that is, to put it in a nutshell, that ignorance has become the dominant influence on what happens these days. Not just with airplanes. But almost everything that is big, complicated, expensive, and not easy to do. Here locally we’ve had massive delays, bad decisions, and staggering cost over-runs on everything from new sewage treatment plants to bridges to tunnels to light rail systems. Ridiculous amounts of money are wasted and projects that used to take months to do drag on for years.
The aerospace industry is about solving problems. From Wilbur and Orville up through today, the whole endeavor is based on solving problems. Because when you want to first simply fly, and then fly faster, then higher and farther and carry more, and then fly quieter and pollute less you are confronted by a staggering array of problems. That, in my opinion, is the real definition of the jobs our engineers and assemblers do--- they solve problems.
Everybody whines about air fares. Probably everybody on TF who’s gloating about the 787 battery problem bitches about the cost to go visit Aunt Sally in Cleveland. They want to fly cheaper and cheaper. Competition has driven the airlines to cut costs to the bone to retain market share and half the time they still lose money. They, in turn, pass that demand to cut costs on to the manufacturers. They want planes that are cheaper to buy, and if that’s not possible they damn well want planes that are way cheaper to operate. So they can continue to entice you to take a flight when you want to visit Aunt Sally.
So what do the manufactures do? What they’ve always done, because this pressure from our customers to cut operating costs is nothing new. We design planes to be more efficient and less costly to own and operate.
Efficiency takes a lot of forms. It’s not just weight or how much fuel the engines burn. It’s how well the plane makes use of everything--- materials, wiring, computers, electricity, water. It’s how much bang for the buck the airline can get out of its flight crews, how efficiently they can do their jobs. It’s how quickly the plane can troubleshoot itself and tell the mechanics exactly what to do, and how fast the mechanics can do it and get the plane back in the air. Because a plane only makes money when it's in the air.
And accomplishing every one of these things means problems to overcome. More and more of them, in fact, as we continue to eke out an increased return on every drop of fuel burned and every hour a pilot or mechanic is on the job.
Electricity is playing a huge role in helping solve these problems. Window shades add weight, and worse, they add maintenance time and cost because they stick, jam, and break. So we’ve eliminated the window shades on the 787 by using dimming window technology. No shades, no weight, and most important, no more fixing them. That’s just one teeny tiny example of how electricity is helping to meet the continuing demand of our customers for lighter, cheaper, more efficient.
Batteries are a must in an airplane and always have been. They have been used forever to provide emergency power for the flight deck displays and other critical components in the event of a total loss of power from the engines. They are also needed to start the auxilliary power unit, which on a B29 was a Briggs and Stratton gasoline generator and on the modern commercial transport is a little jet engine.
As the demand for battery power grew, so did the batteries or the number of them. And anyone who has hauled an 8D or whatever out of the engine room of their boat knows batteries ain’t light.
Turbofan engines used to be air started. Plug in a ground cart to provide air, get one engine going, it provides air to start the rest of the engines. The engines also provided air to run the air conditioning , heating, and pressurization systems. But bleeding air from the engine means there’s that much less power generating thrust. So one of the goals on the 787 was to eliminate the whole bleed air thing. More major problems to solve, but the engineers did it.
But engines still have to be started and the cabin still needs to be pressurized. They are, using electricity now, instead of that power-robbing bleed air that made it even more expensive for the airlines to carry you to see Aunt Sally in Cleveland.
Which means------ better batteries. Batteries that are a hell of a lot more powerful. But loading the plane up with NiCads or whatever was used before wouldn’t work because it would defeat a lot of what the engineers were trying to accomplish with the plane to meet our customers' demands for lighter, cheaper, more efficient. They needed a huge amount of battery power with no weight gain and preferably a weight loss, and not batteries that would build up a “memory” or do the other things that older types of batteries do.
So another problem to solve. And the solution seemed pretty obvious. Lithium batteries, for all the reasons that lithium batteries have become the norm in everything from mobile phones to portable drills to our video camera batteries. They are such an advantage over the older kinds of batteries it’s not even worth making a comparison. But….. as we all know now…. lithium battery technology is not quite where we thought it was.
And here is where the ignorance comes in.
In the aerospace world, this is just another problem to be figured out and solved. The airframe and engine manufacturers have faced far, far more challenging and difficult problems in the past. Wings that didn’t work right, engines that didn’t work right, window frames that didn’t work right in the case of the Comet, tails that came off, engines that burst into flame for “no reason” in the case of the B-29, and on and on and on. And every time, the engineers figured out what was happening and then figured out how to make it not happen again. That’s what aerospace engineers do.
But today, they are hampered by a much bigger problem than things like batteries and exploding engines. They are hampered by ignorance on the part of the media, and subsequently the public, which clamors for instant fixes (same as they clamor for instant gratification in everything else they do). On this forum alone there are people like Sunchaser who gloat at the specter of Boeing failing and FF who lives in an aviation world that ceased to exist decades ago. They, like pretty much most of the public, cannot even conceive of what it’s like to create a new airplane like the 787. And to be fair because this ignorance is an equal-opportunity pain in the ass, the A350. Nevertheless, they glom onto stuff they see in the media, written or broadcast for the most part by people equally ignorant, and in their blatherings they simply reinforce the ignorance.
But as ignorant as they are, these are the voices that tend to sway everything from public opinion to government response. The government, of course, is made up of people who are equally clueless on these subjects, be it aviation or tunnel boring or laying railroad track. So since they know no better, they simply go along with the ignorance and act on it.
Which is why, I believe, nothing gets done anymore with any degree of efficiency and cost effectiveness. We’re reached the point where the ignorant are calling the shots.
I don’t say any of this because I don’t think the 787 should have been grounded. The battery issue is serious---- there is nobody at Boeing who doesn’t think so---- and a solution needs to be found. The new president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Ray Conner who started his career working on the flightline, cancelled the big annual senior leadership meeting last week 15 minutes in and sent everyone back to work to figure out the battery solution.
But the pressure is still on us from our customers to find a solution that will help them compete and knock a buck or two off your ticket price to go visit Aunt Sally. That reality never changes.
And it’s what our engineers do. They solve problems and this is just another one. There will be more, and there will be bigger ones. Maybe on this plane, maybe on the next one. Or maybe even on an earlier one. But they take them on as they come up.
The sad thing is that fewer and fewer people understand this which in turn makes it more and more difficult to solve problems because the bozos keep getting in the way.
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It's tough being up here !
