Excessive Modularity Hindered Development of the 787 200
TAGmclaren writes "The Harvard Business Review is running a fascinating article exploring the issues facing Boeing's Dreamliner. Rather than simply blaming outsourcing, as much of the commentary has been focused on, the article delves into the benefits of integration and how being integrated when developing a new product gives engineers more degrees of freedom. From the article: 'Historically, Boeing understood that, and had worked with its subcontractors on that basis. If it was going to rely on them, it would provide them with detailed blueprints of the parts that were required — after Boeing had already created them. That, in turn, meant that Boeing had to design all the relevant pieces of the puzzle itself, first. But with the 787, it appears that Boeing tried a very different approach: rather than having the puzzle solved and asking the suppliers to provide a defined puzzle piece, they asked suppliers to create their own blueprints for parts. The puzzle hadn't been properly solved when Boeing asked suppliers for the pieces. It should come as little surprise then, that as the components came back from far-flung suppliers, for the first plane ever made of composite materials... those parts didn't all fit together. Time and cost blew out accordingly. It's easy to blame the outsourcing. But, in this instance, it wasn't so much the outsourcing, as it was the decision to modularize a complicated problem too soon.'"
No specs? (Score:5, Insightful)
So Boeing told the contractors what they needed to build, but didn't give them hard specifications? What the hell? Two things:
Boeing needs to have their collective asses kicked for doing it this way, and:
The subcontractors should never have agreed to the work without specs first.
The first one is probably the result of Boeing not wanting to spend the engineering dollars to develop the blueprints, and the second is due to the enormous amounts of money involved in making the parts.
Now that I know this, you'll never catch me on one of those abominations. What the hell was Boeing thinking?
Re:No specs? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Completely agreed. Now, I know that making a phone is not the same as making a plane, but when Apple creates a new iPhone, they make the whole thing in the US first, test it, refine it, then ask manufacturers to build it to specs they know will work.
Maybe such a development process would be too expensive for a plane, I don't know, but it sure makes it easy to figure out what isn't working properly.
Any manufacturer worth their salt (and Boeing is one) should be able to fully prototype their product prior to
Re:No specs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the 21st century, I hope your trip from 1950 was a comfortable one! Here in the 21st century computers have advanced to the point where we don't need to physically prototype things anymore - it can, and has been, done digitally for well over a decade now. In fact, one of the most complex things that man is currently building (a nuclear submarine, something else new to you but take my word on it) are now routinely and successfully designed and built without any physical prototype.
Seriously - you and a bunch of other commenters are utterly clueless as to the state-of-the-art of over a decade ago. Boeing has built (IIRC) three new aircraft now (plus major upgrades like the new 747) using completely digital design, visualization, and validation tools. While it's not entirely a mature technology, it's not new and very complex vehicles are and have been in service for years that were designed and built using it.
Prototyping persists with smaller items because the requisite systems and software are so expensive, and is enabled by the fact that the teams involved are relatively small and simple, physically located in one place, and the prototypes are relatively cheap and new ones can be turned around (at worst) in a few weeks. On the other hand, a mockup/prototype of something like a nuclear submarine or a major aircraft can cost tens of millions of dollars (or more) and take a year or more to assemble. To assume that the latter must prototype because the former do is... ludicrous at best.
The problem here isn't lack of prototyping, it appears that they tried to extend the process too far and the management systems weren't weren't set up properly to handle the new process.
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You are comparing a mass produced product like an aeroplane with a submarine that is pretty much built "money no object". Computer simulation has not yet advanced to the point where you could trust it completely. If it was that easy, no formula 1 team would need a wind tunnel. And the FAA would not require test flights before letting a plane be flown commercially. The computer said everything will work right.
There is no substitute for a prototype. Not yet anyway. And certainly not for anything more complex
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I stand corrected. Maybe I should read linked articles first..
But, I still think it was a case of being penny wise and pound foolish. If I read you correctly, they saved some money by not building the prototype themselves, but then got bit on the ass by the fact that that's a really bad idea and lost money in the long run. Typical corporate thinking. If it costs less TODAY, then that's what you do.
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yes you should...
at the end they talk about how management from McDonnel Douglas was possibly to blame because in the takeover several "top" people from McD took over the top posts at Boeing, and these guys had the defence contractor mentality where you spend a little amount on R&D and expect the DoD to keep on handing cash over to you regularly until you can't milk it any longer. That meant that tried to cost-cut as much of the design as possible up front.
I think it says a lot about defence spending th
Re:No specs? (Score:5, Informative)
This.
I'm a systems engineer, which means that integration is pretty much the only reason my job exists... for projects (hardware/software/everything) which are too big to continuously integrate. Projects that are modularized by design, and very often subcontracted as well.
If the first time you're integrating your product is the first production run, you're too late. You should have had a prototype. You should treat the first production samples AS prototypes. (The wisdom of the "never buy the zero revision of anything" is in this.)
But, yeah, that's expensive. It's cheaper to assume that every subassembly will be perfectly built to perfect specifications, and that interfaces just magically happen, and that integration is just sticking the pieces together and turning a few screws.
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I see different but related issues in software engineering. There is a tendency for developers to want to turn their applications into something like an operating system. So instead of tightly integrated modules it becomes a bundle of modules which theoretically do things and can be thrown together when the application is deployed. The result is that the framework which ties the who lot together becomes very complex, and interactions between the modules become very difficult to understand and test. You get
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If you mention Embraer, then Bombardier (Dash 8), Saab (200 and 340) and Fokker (F50/60) are probably worth noting as well. They're all next-tier players, but potentially could eat into the lower A320-esque end of EADS and Boeing's market. Throw Antonov in there too, with the AN-124 and AN-225 already in production, and you're at the big end.
I read a really interesting article yesterday [flightglobal.com] about the Indian company, Mahindra, wishing to grow in the aerospace market. They already own GippsAero, which is just a
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I used to work in shipbuilding. Systems integration is a BFD in shipbuilding, and you NEVER build prototypes. You can't prototype a $500M product, the first one is a production model. The going consensus in shipbuilding is that you always lose money on the first ship of a class, because there's simply too many things to figure out during the production phase. Numerous attempts have been made to resolve that, but it's simply too hard to account for everything. It seems like Boeing tried to follow this model
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When it comes to mechanical parts, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing is a solved problem. When it comes to electrical interoperability, one'd think that's a solved problem as well. Someone, or many someones at Boeing and/or at the subcontractors don't know their engineering, that's all.
Bad drawings are the rule not the exception (Score:5, Informative)
When it comes to mechanical parts, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing is a solved problem. When it comes to electrical interoperability, one'd think that's a solved problem as well.
"Solved problem"? HAAHAHAHHHAAHHAAAAA....
You don't manufacture things for a living do you? I run a company that makes wire harnesses. We're a contract manufacturer - we don't design things, we just take prints and build what is on the prints. I can count on my fingers on one hand the number of prints we have gotten from customers which were correct and sufficiently detailed such that the product could be built without asking any questions. There pretty much always are critical details left out of the prints. About 2/3 of the prints we see have incompatible parts specified. About half are missing at least one important dimension such as length. About 10% have missing parts and about 25% have incompatible parts. About 20% specify needlessly expensive parts like gold plated terminals that cost more but provide no actual performance benefit. Most of them leave off at least one critical tolerance. I've even seen drawings with dimension in inches and tolerances in metric.
Why does this happen? For the most part because an alarming number of engineers doing the drawings aren't actually very good at their job. Some of them are just plain lazy. The electrical engineers usually can specify a wire schematic but often have no idea whether something can actually be built or know much about industry standards. The more mechanical engineers (yes mechanical engineers can and do design circuits) tend to create bad designs and specify the wrong parts because they don't know any better. Sometimes they are trying to do a good job but they don't bother to consult manufacturing during the design process and they come up with a stupid design or something that is impossible to build.
I have run into some good engineers but they are the exception.
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One would hope that when designing a $200M machine with the lives of 240 depending on it working properly, that you would hire the exceptions.
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I do manufacture things, and it took me 10 years to figure out how to spec things out so that the techs make exactly what I want. The technical problem is solved. The human problem maybe isn't. Human is in having competent engineers. I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to.
Humans are not a solved problem (Score:3)
I do manufacture things, and it took me 10 years to figure out how to spec things out so that the techs make exactly what I want.
We've told engineers exactly how to specify products such that they get what they want and most of them proceed to ignore us. For most products we make I can send you a well formatted spreadsheet and if you fill it out completely you'll get exactly the product you want from us. It really isn't all that complicated but does require a certain attention to detail which seems to be lacking.
The technical problem is solved. The human problem maybe isn't.
There is no maybe about it. The human component is not solved the problems are not separable. Humans design things and
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"I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to."
"I assume that big companies are hyper-competent" is one of this country's most pervasive and dangerous delusions. The opposite is most often the case; especially when a company has a near-monopoly position and powerful political friends, then doing a good job is not necessary.
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About 2/3 of the prints we see have incompatible parts specified. About half are missing at least one important dimension such as length.
Wow, I thought I was the only one observing this... and people complain to me about being too nit-picky about details.
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Well there is a difference between theory and practice
At least in theory.
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No, the opposite. "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is".
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Specs... my late ex, who was an engineer at the Cape for 17 years, told me about the time she received a new module for the Space Station from the Italian team... and IIRC, there were aluminum connectors that were supposed to go to steel connectors. As a metallurgist, among other things, she had a lot to say about that - look up "bimetallic corrosion".
mark
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For software, sure ... but when you're talking about physical things, "release early release often" falls apart.
With something like a 787, you'd sure as heck never be able to do things like that.
By the time you have your first version, you expect to be able to put a pilot into it and at least taxi it around and look at flying.
Rapid release cycles of partly completed software is fine, but it just doesn't
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It doesn't apply to anything large and non-physical (like software). You should carefully plan, measure, build, prototype, and only AFTER all this is done, release something.
Releasing something half finished that isn't software typically means a failure of epic proportions. You can't easily fix something that is already built in real world. Only software is easily fixable via patches. In real world, flaws in build can mean anything from having to fully disassemble your build item to actually having to dump
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Of course, that never happens because when the pieces come together for the first time, unanticipated problems occur.
This, IMHO, is also the central difference between science and engineering, and why the former doesn't translate directly into the later. A scientific theory describes a sequence of causes and effects that's valid for an isolated system. So, while every theory can be absolutely true within its experimental constraints, the moment you take more than one and try to make both work together, all those ignored parameters start showing their ugly heads. Or, put another way:
* Scientific Basis: Theory_1, Theory_2,
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No, the problem wasn't no specs. The problem was that the system was designed on paper first, without actually building it. Then the specs for the individual pieces were created, and those individual modules were built from the specs. The idea was that then the parts were completed, they would be integrated and work perfectly together. Of course, that never happens because when the pieces come together for the first time, unanticipated problems occur. This is why early integration [ibm.com] is a good idea and is part of the philosophy of release early, release often [wikipedia.org].
Isn't that how all modern airliners are created? I'm trying to remember a documentary about the development of the A380, IIRC the entire thing was designed in CAD, the factories were then tooled and the first plane was created from parts from the same production line as the production run would come from.
Now it's a little different with Airbus as they manufactured most parts in their own factories, but I can't see how it would be economically practical to create a completely bespoke prototype aeroplane of t
Re:No specs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't that how all modern airliners are created? I'm trying to remember a documentary about the development of the A380, IIRC the entire thing was designed in CAD, the factories were then tooled and the first plane was created from parts from the same production line as the production run would come from.
The Airbus also suffered from manufacturing problems as the German and Spanish facilities were using a different version of the CATIA CAD tool than the English and French facilities. This resulted in hilarity when modules from different locations did not mate as intended.
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The Airbus also suffered from manufacturing problems as the German and Spanish facilities were using a different version of the CATIA CAD tool than the English and French facilities. This resulted in hilarity when modules from different locations did not mate as intended.
I don't see how making an initial bespoke prototype would have helped with this. An initial custom made part would have been made exactly to design and therefore perfect; the problems at the factory would only have come to light once the production line was tooled and running.
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It's economically practical once you consider the costs of failure if you do not.
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o.O How exactly are you going to build something without a design to build to? Even if you're going to build a mockup or a prototype, you can't use it to iterate a design that doesn't exist. That being said, designing on paper and then building (or at least a prototype or a mockup) is pretty much how everything in the physical world is built.
That being said, Boeing has experience with designing on paper (act
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how can you apply software development philosophies to an aircraft?
iterating and deploying versions of software costs nothing compared to engineering, building, assembling and testing (for hundreds of hours) a flying MACHINE. if a single component has a "fatal error" - you need more engines, airframe, avionics.. etc. something like this MUST be designed and tested using computer modeling at least initially, because full "end to end" testing for every iteration is cost prohibitive... not just in time/money,
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The odd thing is that IIRC Boeing and Lockheed were among the first to design machines (airplanes in their case) entirely in CAD with 3D modeling of the entire plane, including part fitting, wiring, ducting, etc. I would have thought that they would have provided that capability as part of the outsourcing agreements. This problem need not have happened even with the outsourcers doing the part design, if they could also test fit the parts into the 3D design. Perhaps there were proprietary and/or security
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I actually logged in for this response...
Do you REALLY think that is accurate? Do you really think Boeing put the plane together with a bunch of non-spec'd parts? Do you really think that a plane would get off the ground with that type of engineering? Seriously?
An MBA put his two cents together and came up with a penny and you bought it. Most likely there was a lot of back and forth over specification early in the project as prototypes were being built. That does not translate into substandard final designs
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I think that if the bean counters decided that was a good idea, and gave it to the engineers to work on with inadequate support, it's possible that the engineers, being responsible and ethical, made the impossible happen through serious overwork.
If I understand bunratty's response above, it
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Aside from the intent of the article, Boeing did indeed put together the first 787 with non-specced parts - in their haste to make the 07-08-2007 roll out date (7-8-7), Boeing failed to order aviation grade fasteners with enough lead time from their suppliers and they literally had to buy a batch from your every day DIY store, and replace them at great cost and effort afterward. One of the reasons the first four 787s have been written off and will never be sold (the original intent was to sell all the cert
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Those fasteners were designed to hold the composite components to the titanium sub structure, and even in t
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It comes from direct involvement in the program, and yes the first 787 rolled out had approximately 60% of its fasteners as installed being non-aviation grade, sourced from the same suppliers as any non-aviation manufacturer would source them - they all had to be drilled out and replaced later on at great cost and effort, using oversized fasteners due to the increased hole size.
As I noted in my original post, Boeing failed to source the correct fasteners with enough lead time from its usual supplier, leadin
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rather than having the puzzle solved and asking the suppliers to provide a defined puzzle piece, they asked suppliers to create their own blueprints for parts. The puzzle hadn't been properly solved when Boeing asked suppliers for the pieces.
Using some computer science-lite language their design and physical parts "networks" used to be a hub-n-spoke topology. That has always worked pretty well. This time around they tried something like a fully connected mesh for design (because in real world engineering, unlike CS, practically everything affects everything) but they maintained the hub-n-spoke topology for physical parts. There's a bit of a mismatch there.
I believe the hope -n- dream was forcing the subs to mesh with every other sub would re
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This gives yet more evidence of the flawed nature of the MBA ideology of management methods being independent from the technical processes of what is actually being managed. There is no substitute for hard won knowledge slogging through the real details of industrial processes. I have said it before, and I'll say it again: the cult-like ideology of MBA managers is driving America into the ground.
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Re:No specs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having lived for over 5 years in Japan, I doubt the Japanese subcontractors would build anything without clear specifications.
The problem is the toilet seat bracket had to be made 1/10 mm thicker for supersized passengers, and that was properly annotated by the seat mfgr on blueprint revision #24352. Unfortunately the news never reached the design engineers for the landing gear who need to adjust blueprint revision #7652 foward by 2 mm
My extensive experience with electronic design is if the Chinese say they'll give you a container full of old fashioned thru hole 1K resistors at a tenth of a penny each or whatever they will in fact do so. Maybe they painted the resistor color code with lead paint and the assembly line workers are political prisoners, but the resistance and power dissipation specs will be more or less as per the data sheet. And you can talk the Indonesians into providing a container full of microwave medium power bipolar transistors with a Pd of one watt and a Ft of 25 GHz for two bucks each and they will in fact do it. But god help you if you tell both of them, "I'd like a class A biased driver amp assembly so you two kids cooperate mkay?" Now multiply that by one zillion subcontractors all operating more or less without adult oversight by design to save money as a new project management technique, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
"I've got an idea, lets improve the obvious metrics, then you little guys can work together to design and build it which will make me a bunch of money, mkay?" That stuff doesn't fly.
Generic modularity is a good approach. (Score:3)
I suspect that with the mindset of a government contractor they told a bunch of different places sort of what they wanted, but not where it had to be or what it was going to plug into. Measurements, plugs, protocol standards, bolt holes, shape - they all matter - and "on a plane" doesn't answer most of the questions.
Interesting problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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This is what happens with subcontracting (Score:2)
This is what happens with subcontracting you give up to much control and people in the contracting line cut corners where they can.
C'mon, losers, we solved this in the 70's! (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously, Boeing should simply have specified that all the contractors deliver components that accept and output plaintext, and then used pipes and awk to cobble the pieces together into a working system! What could possibly go wrong?
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Obviously, Boeing should simply have specified that all the contractors deliver components that accept and output plaintext, and then used pipes and awk to cobble the pieces together into a working system! What could possibly go wrong?
As long as they did the scripting in VI... nothing. Emacs on the other hand?? Phew!... don't get me started.
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Obviously, Boeing should simply have specified that all the contractors deliver components that accept and output plaintext, and then used pipes and awk to cobble the pieces together into a working system! What could possibly go wrong?
Battery fire.
Nah, just add a battery fire error message. We've been doing that with printers for decades.
Pack the batteries in sugar (Score:2)
Pack the batteries in sugar, that way when they burn you get pretty colors and nice caramel smell.
Hmm...question? (Score:2)
By "hindered development," do they mean "made it harder?" If so...fucking duh. That's what happens when you try a new approach to building something...but that's not necessarily a reason not to innovate, and the fact that mistakes were made isn't necessarily an indictment of the activities that took place in the course of that innovation.
Coming up with a new way of building a large commercial airliner is not going to be easy, and you're going to make mistakes. The article seems a little light on details;
Engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
Boeing didn't want to hire all the engineers needed to design the 787. So when they outsourced these subsystems they also counted on their suppliers to do the engineering of these subsystems.
The problem is that engineers are not fungible. Boeing didn't appreciate this, any more than the software industry did when it started outsourcing.
An aerospace structural frame engineer is not the same thing as a marine structure engineer. There are huge differences in the body of experience despite the fact that they both use the same tools.
This was the primary cause of the delays Boeing had. It will continue to be a problem for anyone who tries this sort of outsourcing.
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The batteries are small. They should have simply swapped them out for a tad heavier and larger Ni-MH units. They went to unproven technology for savings of tens of kilograms and tens of liters of volume over the whole plane. They are stupid. That's all. There's a point where the savings are too small to risk a whole new battery tech. It's not an all-electric plane where it'd be a big deal. Those batteries are relatively small, relatively light, and don't need such a level of optimization and risk taking.
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Why? Assuming its a technical thing rather than a bunch of economic handwaving.
LiFe is deployed in general aviation and aviation grade batts are COTS from the usual aerospace suspects. I read up on that battery system yesterday, apparently that specific chemistry is pretty tough and something about a ceramic cell separator
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Crowd-sourced design? (Score:2)
Wow, they crowd-sourced the design of a wide body aircraft?
So it's their reputation on the line, and likely a lot of the legal liability .. but they gave the suppliers reign to design their own parts?
That sounds like an epic fail in engineering to me. The 777 was a marvel in that every part had been designed and modeled in a computer before they ever built anything -- this sounds like a hodge-podge of parts.
At around $200 million a pop or so, that sounds awfully risky.
So it was outsourcing (Score:2)
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It's the 21st century. It's not like Skype is a new thing, you know. It's a management fiasco. Boeing managers should have made sure that those engineers from various suppliers do in fact talk to each other, and talk often.
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Boeing managers should have made sure that those engineers from various suppliers do in fact talk to each other, and talk often.
If they put resources toward general contractor-type work that eliminates the whole purpose of outsourcing / eliminating the general contractor work. "We'll pay you guys to do it, but since you won't, we'll do it too, to save money"
Operating in direct opposition to the bosses new management style is probably career limiting.
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Boeing managers should have made sure that those engineers from various suppliers do in fact talk to each other, and talk often.
Right in the era of NDAs and intellectual property being regarded as our chief output, that is probably impossible.
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Great in theory, but in practice it's just not the same. Even if the different contractors are introduced to one another, they're still not really familiar with each other, nor do they necessarily view each other as being on the same team. Collaborations like this just work way better when everyone is working under the same hierarchy and getting their personal paychecks from the same place.
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This may well be, but it's a starting state. People can learn to work around it -- when properly guided. That's where the management comes in.
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That was an awfully long summary to say "it was outsourcing." But the submitter obviously likes to hear himself talk so he gave it a different name.
First composite airplane? (Score:2)
Was not a Beech ðe first composite airplane?
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I doubt it. Wasn't the Wright flyer made of wood and fabric?
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*knock on wood* (Score:2)
From the BBC story [bbc.co.uk]:
"I think people had their fingers crossed that it was a battery fault... it looks more systemic and serious to me. I suspect it could be difficult to identify the cause," [Keith Hayward, head of research at the Royal Aeronautical Society] said.
I would hope the folks in change of designing and building aircraft would depend on measurements and calculations, not crossed fingers. Did they also consult a Ouija board?
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I think the article (and the person talking) meant that they hoped it was a battery problem because they would then have isolated the problem to a single component, which is much easier to fix.
If the problem is systemic, then it can be orders of magnitude harder to fix. For example, is it because the components, whilst each individually OK, behave in strange ways when combined in a certain way. Is the issue an emergent property of the whole system or only of part of the system? And which part. Is the part t
First composite airplane? No... (Score:2)
Burt Rutan's beautiful creation holds that title.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Starship [wikipedia.org]
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Um, try again. One of the first composite aircraft was the Bolkow Phoebus sailplane designed in the 50's. It was built with a balsa core and glass fiber. Carbon fiber sailplanes began to be produced starting in the mid 70's.
" Carbon fiber composite was used to varying degrees on military aircraft, but at the time the Starship was certified, no civilian aircraft certified by the US Federal Aviation Administration had ever used it so extensively."
Also, I'm talking airplanes, not gliders.
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Gliders are airplanes. Perhaps you meant powered airplanes.
Yes, if you look you can find a crappy dictionary that includes jets and/or propellors in the definition, but the good dictionaries define it properly.
Also, your own quote suggests that "first composite airplane" is entirely a subjective title based on how much composite you consider to be enough. And carbon fibre composite at that.
outsource that (Score:2)
It's easy to blame the outsourcing.
Ok so if it wasn't outsourcing what was the problem?
But, in this instance, it wasn't so much the outsourcing, as it was the decision to modularize a complicated problem too soon.'
Oh, so it was outsourcing, they were just trying to outsource as early as possible so they won't have to pay engineers to develop the specs.
Boeing (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a short article on the Dreamliner in the latest New Yorker magazine REQUIEM FOR A DREAMLINER? . Quote Surowiecki :The Dreamliner was supposed to become famous for its revolutionary design. Instead, it’s become an object lesson in how not to build an airplane.
To understand why, you need to go back to 1997, when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. Technically, Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas. But, as Richard Aboulafia, a noted industry analyst with the Teal Group, told me, “McDonnell Douglas in effect acquired Boeing with Boeing’s money.” McDonnell Douglas executives became key players in the new company, and the McDonnell Douglas culture, averse to risk and obsessed with cost-cutting, weakened Boeing’s historical commitment to making big investments in new products. Aboulafia says, “After the merger, there was a real battle over the future of the company, between the engineers and the finance and sales guys.” The nerds may have been running the show in Silicon Valley, but at Boeing they were increasingly marginalized by the bean counters.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/02/04/130204ta_talk_surowiecki#ixzz2JTGx7SPc
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MBAs are like politicians. When they need to be bitch slapped and put away, they end up untouchable. But you can't effectively run a country like that, and you certainly can't run an aircraft building company like that - except run it INTO THE GROUND in both cases.
ObAlexander (Score:2)
Post-web people may like to read what was all the rage in the early 1990's: the deep philosophy of software development. Doug Lea has a concise summary [oswego.edu], so you don't have to read several hundred pages. And here's a quick direct quote [google.com] from Christopher Alexander I just now Googled:
Read reason Boeing built it in pieces... (Score:2)
Boeing built it in pieces because they had to be able to sell the plane to foreign countries. It's a tremendous sales aid being able to point to parts of the plane being built by the country interested in purchasing the plane. This is why it's a mess of a build.
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Almost 40% of a Boeing 777 by weight is foreign sourced (not including engines) so they didn't have to build it n pieces to include foreign suppliers - aside from that, the point of the article is that Boeing also gave the job of detailed design definition to the outsourced suppliers, and that is where the issue comes in.
Aircraft have been built in pieces for decades before the 787, for example all Airbus aircraft since the A320 in the mid 1980s have been built as prefabricated sections and joined on the FA
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" Airbus have only had one major issue with this approach"
What? no, not true at all.
Bad Cockpit design,. bad wiring, premature stress cracks in the wings.
" it worked perfectly for every aircraft before.
all airplane have items that " worked perfectly for every aircraft before." right up until it crashes. It's a nonsense statement.. at BEST it shows a company not testing old systems on new air craft.
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"Bad cockpit design" - no worse than any other. Care to elaborate?
"Bad wiring" - again, care to elaborate? If you mean the A380 debacle, did you miss the part of my point where I explicitly mentioned that as the only major issue they had with their approach?
"Premature stress cracks in the wings" - using a new production process in an Airbus factory, which would have occurred if Airbus produced the wings 100 yards from the FAL anyway. Hardly a great argument against my point.
The design and build process Ai
Other interesting Boeing paper (Score:2)
In this artcle they cite a 2001 Boeing paper [amazonaws.com] which I find very interesting.
All those MBA bosses should have a look, it seems very few have learned any lesson since then.
The point is made that not only is the work out-sourced; all the profits associated with the work are out-sourced, too.
...
A strong warning is included about the perils of sub-optimum solutions in which individual cost are minimized in isolation.
It is quite enlightening, given that their problem today could very likely come from those interdepartmental interactions not thoroughly planned enough.
More common than you think... (Score:2)
I have news for you. This is how most things are developed.
Homes are built from standardized components, as are production machines, cars, computers and even software. Often, we pick our components first, with only a hazy idea of the finished product. We think we know what we are developing, but after its built, it usually looks quite different than first imagined.
The key is Boeing is developing a much more difficult design and this is their first attempt at using this method. It is understandable that
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true, homes are built from standardised components but you'll find those components are very well defined and fit together well enough to work. That was the problem with this - the pieces were not well defined enough to fit together well.
Of course a brick is less complicated than an aircraft component, but even then you know exactly what you want to build, and you work out how its going to be put together and then you build it. No-one thinks "I'll build a house, I'll need, umm, some bricks and some wood" an
Top down vs Bottom up (Score:3)
So if you look at the Space X people they are doing the opposite and seeing how good an engine they can build and then plopping a spaceship on top of that. This is how functional companies that don't have too much MBA management bloat engineer things. But my guess is that instead of Boeing just designing a better airplane with composites and seeing what interesting things could be done they made a long series of "executive" decisions and then told outsourced engineering teams to make square pegs fit into round holes. This would be as opposed to a healthy back and fourth where a high level goal is set, the rubber meets the road engineers give their feed back that changes the high level design which results in more feedback until you have a solid high level design that the engineers are fairly certain they can design.
I suspect nearly every programmer here has had a taste of this when some MBA type demands a costly feature that when all is said and done will be used by one person to very little benefit; all because there was no real feedback mechanism to say "whoa there dumb feature."
That's WHY outsourcing (Score:2)
is the problem. Well, you save a few pennies in development Boeing, hows that working out for you?
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Stop.. In manufacturing there's a lot of integration, third party suppliers or outsourcing as it can also be called. All of those have various degrees of risk associated with them. When you're talking about the scale of what Boeing did on the 787, I think it created new management challenges that they weren't fully expecting and the result was cost overruns and schedule delays. They've always integrated and outsourced with partners. For example I know that they don't make their own nuts and bolts, or ri
The solution was not far from them... (Score:2)
Agile aerospace development (Score:2)
Its because ... (Score:2)
"Things" that do "stuff". (Score:2)
I think part of the problem is that Boeing defined what components they needed, but not necessarily completely how they were to be built or function internally (for things that have internals). For example, they may have specified an electronic component by its inputs/outputs and working/environmental tolerances, but not anything about the internals. In theory, this "black box" approach should work pretty well, but - as we programmers know - side effects, edge conditions and unknowns are a bitch.
In the
Krugman called it two years ago (Score:2)
I know I'm late for a nice flamefest, but I'm sure someone will point out how Krugman was wrong about this when he discussed it almost two years ago: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/thank-you-boeing/ [nytimes.com]
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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TLDR scalability issue due to cubed vs square law scaling.
High temperature can blow up some Li cells. The total thermal energy scales with volume, but the surface heat can escape from scales with surface area. So its hard (although not impossible) for one cell in a laptop to blow up the adjacent cells. But if you make the individual cells big enough you can get a chain reaction going.
This is a meta issue anyway. There are battery techs not susceptible to chain reactions, and not susceptible to occasiona
Plutonium mouse pads vs Lithium-Ion Batteries (Score:3)
Where your analogy breaks down is that weight matters for a plane. Plutonium doesn't make for a superior mousepad, but lithium ion has the advantage of a wider operating temperature range(specifically colder), high efficiency, power capacity, and energy density.
IE a lithium ion battery is going to generally be at least half the weight of any other chemistry for the necessary power/energy demands of the application, and you don't need to worry as much about heating them. For a plane, this makes you really
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Well, demonstrably it didn't contain much because there was smoke on board. Containment means the battery dies, and outside, apart from lost functionality, nothing bad happens. Smoke is kind of a no-no.
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Didn't some Fiskers blow up with the flooding in Hurricane Sandy? [wired.com] So now you want to put these on an airplane as a critical part of the electrical system. Flawed thinking. Go back to a stable design and look for the 200lbs of weight savings elsewhere. Hire thinner flight attendants or don't fly fat people around.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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OMG what a bunch of BS. If you have a cellphone anywhere from 75% to 100% is manufacturing "outsourced" and in the case of design that can be anywhere from 0% to 100% as the design is outsourced as well. Look at all the products out there that are the same but sold under different brand names. We're not talking creamed corn here either. Unfortunately the modern world requires outsourcing, not to be confused with shipping jobs overseas because of cheap labor, that's another argument. It's well documente