737 Door Plug and Atlas Shrugged
So, we have a bright young engineering student working in our office as an intern. Real nice kid. We were talking literature the other day and I mentioned how much Atlas Shrugged impacted my life. So, he is listening to the audio version now and keeping me updated on where he is in the book, and how much he's enjoying it. He asked me today for current examples of major screwups like the examples from the book. Didn't take me long to respond.
The latest is this door plug flying out of the 737 fuselage. My first job out of college was at Boeing, as a structures engineer. I explained to my young colleague that, first, the engineering staff is tasked with producing a good design and at Boeing they've been doing worse and worse. Second, there is a federally regulated QC structure at Boeing to ensure the aircraft are built correctly. That failed. This isn't like the old British Comet scattering itself across the Atlantic. That was due to industry lack of knowledge on aluminum (Brits say "aluminium") and stress concentration factors. Now we all know better. This is just a matter of either basic stress analysis or untightened parts making their way into service with full occupancy of paying customers. No excuse. After I left Boeing I received regular updates from my fellow engineer there who, ironically, had worked his way into the marketing office. I remember when he sent me a note that when they were testing the Dreamliner on the famous wing bend test the fuselage above the wing started to buckle around 2 gs. Boeing had already started its transition from an engineer-lead company to one lead by bean counters. Now we have this. I also added that we’ve had some airline pilots increasingly making really dumb errors lately. Much of this is the result of poor government along with the cultural shift I mention toward bean counters. Today he got to the train explosion in the tunnel…
The other example that came to mind is the Pfizer executive admitting that they never really had any knowledge about the C19 vaccine’s effectiveness before they rolled it out to the public. The government and cultural issues on that are multi-layered. But, it’s an example of Atlas Shrugged-like problems….”You can be sure that when their sick little comforts are threatened, science is the first then men will abandon.”
The latest is this door plug flying out of the 737 fuselage. My first job out of college was at Boeing, as a structures engineer. I explained to my young colleague that, first, the engineering staff is tasked with producing a good design and at Boeing they've been doing worse and worse. Second, there is a federally regulated QC structure at Boeing to ensure the aircraft are built correctly. That failed. This isn't like the old British Comet scattering itself across the Atlantic. That was due to industry lack of knowledge on aluminum (Brits say "aluminium") and stress concentration factors. Now we all know better. This is just a matter of either basic stress analysis or untightened parts making their way into service with full occupancy of paying customers. No excuse. After I left Boeing I received regular updates from my fellow engineer there who, ironically, had worked his way into the marketing office. I remember when he sent me a note that when they were testing the Dreamliner on the famous wing bend test the fuselage above the wing started to buckle around 2 gs. Boeing had already started its transition from an engineer-lead company to one lead by bean counters. Now we have this. I also added that we’ve had some airline pilots increasingly making really dumb errors lately. Much of this is the result of poor government along with the cultural shift I mention toward bean counters. Today he got to the train explosion in the tunnel…
The other example that came to mind is the Pfizer executive admitting that they never really had any knowledge about the C19 vaccine’s effectiveness before they rolled it out to the public. The government and cultural issues on that are multi-layered. But, it’s an example of Atlas Shrugged-like problems….”You can be sure that when their sick little comforts are threatened, science is the first then men will abandon.”
THEY……the Mr Thompson type…..can suck balls.
Had someone call out of the blue a few days ago asking me if I would design/build a control panel for a piece of automation. I declined. Saying I was “retired” they stammered a bit since they knew I’m only 53 but said thank you for considering and hung up. There are EXACTLY 3 people I will do something for if asked by them. Otherwise THEY can pound sand.
They’ll get some young buck….who doesn’t yet understand that operators are the most unpredictable part of the equation and you need to account for their actions in your programming. When the operator messes up the order of operation…and they will…..the machine needs to recover gracefully from the fault subroutine. He’ll get it eventually BUT there’s just a wee bit of GDP lost because of the extra time required. And the trips to the site….yada yada. Death by a thousand cuts.
In the mean time…..I’m building a Radio Controlled Tugboat with working fire monitor and crane to recover my nitro powered RC Airboat. A much more productive use of my time in my opinion.
The predictable result was severe brain drain.
The best and the brightest have left the building and are not coming back.
The internet is full of resources to find interesting places to stop along the way. Fortunately I am now retired so I can take as long as I like. But even when I was still working, I had sufficient vacation that I managed to take two 2-week trips from Alabama to San Diego in one year to attend business conferences. We took two different routes (actually four counting out and back) so we got to see a lot of America in between.
Having done some work with O-rings, I commented that it was frosty cold that morning in Florida, and it was probably an O-ring that was too cold and inflexible to seal properly. My thought from 3,000 miles away.
It's also the result of hiring by diversity, rather than ability.
We'll be seeing a lot more of this in future.
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