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Transportation Technology

Boeing Wants To Build Its Next Airplane in the 'Metaverse' (reuters.com) 81

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
In Boeing's factory of the future, immersive 3-D engineering designs will be twinned with robots that speak to each other, while mechanics around the world will be linked by $3,500 HoloLens headsets made by Microsoft. From a report: It is a snapshot of an ambitious new Boeing strategy to unify sprawling design, production and airline services operations under a single digital ecosystem -- in as little as two years. Critics say Boeing has repeatedly made similar bold pledges on a digital revolution, with mixed results. But insiders say the overarching goals of improving quality and safety have taken on greater urgency and significance as the company tackles multiple threats.

The planemaker is entering 2022 fighting to reassert its engineering dominance after the 737 MAX crisis, while laying the foundation for a future aircraft program over the next decade -- a $15 billion gamble. It also aims to prevent future manufacturing problems like the structural flaws that have waylaid its 787 Dreamliner over the past year. "It's about strengthening engineering," Boeing's chief engineer, Greg Hyslop, told Reuters in his first interview in nearly two years. "We are talking about changing the way we work across the entire company." After years of wild market competition, the need to deliver on bulging order books has opened up a new front in Boeing's war with Europe's Airbus, this time on the factory floor.
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Boeing Wants To Build Its Next Airplane in the 'Metaverse' More

Boeing Wants To Build Its Next Airplane in the 'Metaverse'

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  • Decoded from corporate speak (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @11:03AM (#62090587)
    We don't want to pay for live testing and will attempt to simulate everything up until acceptance flight. Which we hope won't crash.

    • Re:Decoded from corporate speak (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @11:18AM (#62090631)

      Yep.

      What they need are clever quality engineers whose jobs are to both determine extreme but realistic scenarios to test against, and to create and execute those tests effectively. But that costs money.

      This seems like the same BS as in the software industry where they're trying to get the developers to test their own code rigorously, with upper managers seeming to fail to understand that the developer is incapable of being at arm's length to what they wrote and thus objective about testing it.

      • What they need are clever quality engineers

        Not really. Many years ago, when I was involved in aircraft certification (pre McDonnell Douglas) it became evident that the more people you put on the design review and QA process, the more bugs they would find. And the more time and money would have to be spent chasing failure modes through "bug space". The "art" of managing this process was to budget enough money and manpower to find the really nasty problems. And then run out of money when there were (hopefully) only minor ones left.

        What Boeing will ha

        • I hope they realize that meta space is not real, and airlines will not pay Boeing for virtual airplanes to virtually fly people around.
        • Hm. Ok, sounds like you know the ins and outs of this. So, the problem with the Max was that they were too stingy with QA and missed a critical bug of the “ and then everyone dies” type. Seems like they missed setting the threshold, hella badly. Was this an engineering failure or a management failure? Cause no matter how you look at it, they left in a problem that caused hundreds of deaths and then tried to sweep it under the rug.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by TWX ( 665546 )

            Which is the point of the QE team being experienced and capable. The point is that the QE team is also adversarial.

            More of reply to PPH, at some point the heads of the PE team and the QE team have to sit down with each other and then with their respective teams, to confirm the nature of what the two teams are clashing about,and what's truly important. Then it becomes a management issue.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            Umh...they missed *several* critical bugs of the âoe and then everyone diesâ type.

            I'm not encouraged that this new approach will solve anything. It looks like "shiney!", and I expect several really bad new types of bug to show up during development. Possibly after the current managers have switched jobs. When they'll be detected is an interesting question.

          • Re: Decoded from corporate speak (Score:4, Interesting)

            by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @04:40PM (#62092055)

            Was this an engineering failure or a management failure?

            Yes.

            Things have changed a bit since I was there (for the worse). But it used to be up to the DER (designated engineering representative) to certify things by similarity or demand a whole new analysis and/or flight tests for a change. So when they went from 0.6 degrees maximum MCAS authority to 2.5 degrees, who was there to ask for a certification do-over? Management is supposed to be 'hands off' the DER certification process. But since a DER is an in-company FAA rep* but paid by Boeing, I wonder how much autonomy they really have.

            The best DERs I've ever worked with were nearing retirement age. In a position to say "Fuck it! I'm retiring." when management pressure grew.

            *Not always. There are some consultant DERs out there. But not so much at larger companies.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        The idea that a developer should attempt to test his own code rigorously is far from BS. The problem is thinking that is a substitute for other forms of testing. It isn't just belt-and-suspenders thinking, although there's nothing wrong with that per se. It's about catching *some* problems early before they're baked into the system and producing higher quality code *even if that code has bugs in it*.

        • Agreed, good developers can and do test successfully. Relying on some other group to test can stifle the learning process that allows a dev to become truly good at the full cycle. I've always trained devs that work for me in this process and typically we get to a point where bugs become rare, but it takes time and focus on the process.

          Having said that, you still need the kind of testing that spans significant components and systems that a lone dev would be challenged to do n their own (due to complex sys

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by spun ( 1352 )

      To be fair, augmented reality construction has been a dream of Boeing's since my mom worked there in the 80s. I remember going in on take your kid to work day one time and seeing a mock up of augmented reality goggles used for showing routing for pipes and wiring in ariplanes.

      Of course the company has gone down hill since then. This idea was absolutely revolutionary in the 80s. Now it's just cliché.

      • Aerospace has been a pioneer in CAD since the very beginning. A 747 has 6 million parts. Now, whether AR has much to add vs. monitors, I don't know, engineers get very good at understanding things from orthogonal views.

        However assembly is still a different matter and is hard to do without mistakes along the line. Perhaps AR could help. What I mean is not just showing workers where to put the next rivet, but tracking every assembly step automatically, to ensure it is done and is auditable. AR is at

        • There seems to be no generally agreed date or place where Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing saw the light of day as a practical tool for making things. However, I know of no earlier candidate for this role than Boeingâ(TM)s 727 aircraft. Certainly the dates given in the current version of Wikipedia are woefully late; ten years or so.

          So, this section is a description of what we did at Boeing from about the mid-fifties to the early sixties. It is difficult to specify precisely when this project st

        • It will be interested to see how it works for them. Any organization that aspires to lead it's field has to experiment with new methods. I just hope they don't commit to developing their next airliner with it until they have some successful pilot projects completed.

    • Boeing is going to be all excited about their "meta" design of their new plane. Until they find out they can't find a reliable real world source for slime blocks.

    • Nice and ironic, but ignorant. Boeing has been doing this already since the 90's. The 777 was designed entirely via CAD starting in 1992, in a global collaboration between 8 airlines and numerous vendors. the first few physical model tests to test designed ocmponents in the collaborative computer software (mostly mid 90's era CATIA) were so successful they scrapped the later model tests and went straight to a full prototype and an 11 month flight testing program.

      The 787 had problems because they used

    • They'll use the same software expertise that gave us the Boeing 737 MAX.

      • Maybe if they test in a VR environment that the public can access, somebody could ask "Hey shouldn't this sensor reading that could tun the aircraft into a V2 buzzbomb have some kind of redundancy?"

        • *History correction - The V1 was the buzzbomb that flew until a prop-driven screw locked the elevator into a dive position, the V2 was an early ICBM ;-)

    • We don't want to pay for live testing and will attempt to simulate everything up until acceptance flight. Which we hope won't crash.

      Require all Boeing executives to be physically on all those acceptance flights, then see what their safety/testing procedures are...

  • Boeing teaming up with Meta reminds me of when Enron teamed up with Blockbuster.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/S... [wsj.com]

  • in the metaverse (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Is "in the metaverse" going to be the next "on the internet" or "on a phone?"

    I have the terrible feeling there will be patents where they take something common and add those words. We've seen this happen before.

    • Re:in the metaverse (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dysmal ( 3361085 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @11:12AM (#62090613)

      You forgot about "blockchain"

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by TWX ( 665546 )

      First thing that "metaverse" reminded me of was Second Life [wikipedia.org], an online 3d virtual environment. Which reminded me of various cyberpunk novels by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.

      None of this sounds like it is in any way practical or productive. Perhaps they'll prove me wrong but I'm most definitely a skeptic.

      • Which reminded me of various cyberpunk novels by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.

        I would hope so, since the term originated in Snow Crash, and is a direct descendant of that idea. I think we already are living in the corporate nightmare of that world, we just haven't had the crash of governments world wide yet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > I have the terrible feeling there will be patents where they take something common and add those words. We've seen this happen before.

      My latest idea it to take the metaverse and ad a metal door to the front. I call it a Franklin Metaverse.

  • Headline (Score:5, Funny)

    by LatencyKills ( 1213908 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @11:09AM (#62090607)

    400 avatars were killed today when a virtual Boeing Max aircarft crashed in the metaverse. Boeing is blaming software.

  • Will basically look and work the same.

  • very little that is new here (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @11:17AM (#62090623) Journal

    Boeing first utilized augmented reality to good effect in the 90s. They had massive panels (100s of feet long in some cases) that were used to make wiring harnesses. Each was unique as it was marked with all of the wiring paths and had pegs in specific places to hold the wires as they were laid out. The warehouse space alone to store these panels in between uses was costing a lot of money. In the late 90s, they changed to a system that used AR goggles to virtually display the wiring paths on generic panels thus eliminating tons of panels.

    And, like everyone in all vehicle industries, they went full 3D on their design systems long ago. They've also been using VR systems, including rooms, to view the designs and to make sure maintenance personnel can effectively access what they need to. They also use VR to train maintenance folks and have AR systems to guide them in real time.

    So, this is just a step change versus much of what they already do.

  • Boeing learning a cost-effective lesson (Score:3)

    by Reiyuki ( 5800436 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @11:27AM (#62090659)
    It's easier to build things in a virtual world than in the real world.

  • Here I was hoping that at least I can feel safe in my VR virtual world without having to worry about a plane built on an MBA budget killing my avatar.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      Wait until they introduce VR covid. Then you'll have to virtual distance while wearing a virtual mask and take virtual boosters.

      • I think you just solved the VR collision accommodation problem. No need to worry about people getting detached from reality due a lack of a physical feedback mechanism if you can't reach out and touch the other avatar :-)

  • Walk before you can run (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @11:30AM (#62090673)
    How about they first figure out how to make their Dreamliner without manufacturing defects or McDonalds boxes left in the fuselage.
  • Now the are just another "our only job is increasing shareholder value" company.

    The problem is that human organizations tend to perform to their metrics. When the metric is increasing shareholder value, increased shareholder value is what you get.

    You don't get good planes, or cars, or software, or anything.

    • > increased shareholder value is what you get.

      Only up to a point. Then it all goes in golden parachutes for the board and penny-ante selloffs to the receivers, shareholders can all go and get stuffed.

  • on the blockchain, with smart contracts and quantum computers.

    The plane is not crashed until the metaverse collapses.

  • I knew Boeing was not in good shape, but this indicates they are now deeply enough in bullshit-space that they may not survive for much longer.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Bringing 3D design into actual AR/VR 3D was a planned step for at least a decade in CAD engineering and design. I've watched power plant designers who have to route countless thousands of kilometers of piping of various kinds in a space of approximately 100m x 100m x 50m that is a typical boiler building, and the tricks they have to use to emphasize what pipe goes where in terms of depth from the view point at a glance made my head hurt. And I'm really good with 3D routing.

      (Well, actually they account for e

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, you just missed that I have no problem with 3D/VR design tools. But doing it in the "Metaverse" implies something else.

        And getting that "expert quickly"? Have you been asleep as to what is going on with regards to attacks on companies, networks, systems and data? I have talked to industrial construction companies and you know what they are scared about? Somebody messing with their designs and them not noticing. And then comes the extortion: Oh, you know, that plane model you have in the air there has

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Your complaints can be summed up as "but it may create new security problems".

          Do you know what else had the same problem? Pretty much every single advancement in industrial design to date. Did that stop their adoption?

    • but this indicates they are now deeply enough in
      bullshit-space that they may not survive for much
      longer

      No problem.
      They only have to last until the next bailout.

  • If only VR headsets where the secret to solving all engineering quality issues. I mean, it was in Jurassic Park (they had to point it out because VR was being hyped back when that movie was being made).

  • New shiny tool. Let's literally come up with excuses to try using it.

  • your plane can't have anti-stall software the pilots don't know about.

    • Delivering training more efficiently (maybe through VR/AR) could actually help prevent another 737-Max type problem. Pilots in less affluent markets did not get all the training they needed to recognize and handle the new failure mode, so what was engineered at the level of an assist became in effect a safety-critical system.

  • Hahaha .. ok so they definitely have no idea what they are doing.

  • Boeing wants to design future aircraft using real-time collaborative software and as much as practical and improve software managing their supply chain for improved efficiency and adaptability.

    Boeing, boring. Needs more snappy modern... what's the hip word these days? Oh, yes. Metaverse.

  • If we're going to insist on using the term Metaverse to describe a persistent VR world, can Neal Stephenson at least receive royalties every time we say it? :)
  • ...keeping their next plane strictly confined into a metauniverse is a good idea, provided it does not ever escape from there.

  • It's also the only place where people will fly a Boeing.

  • OK, not true, still safer than my airplane, but really....they are thinking of an entirely new way to do engineering collaboration after disastrous management decisions cost them billions of $ and killed hundreds of people???

    Maybe this is even better than "collaborative workspaces" where their engineers can be constantly distracted and prone to making mistakes.

  • Let's hope that they fly the plane in the metaverse as well - then it will only kill virtual people instead of real ones!

  • ...then it should be ok I guess

  • That is all. Just a rallying cry to promote the engineers! I'm beginning to wonder if the current Boeing management ever played with Legos.

  • And no blue screen of death jokes.

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