Perhaps.

 Which part of designing an airplane is the least difficult?

If you said the Aerodynamics, you would get a call from the structures people to discuss about the F word at various speeds and loadouts affecting particular portions of the design.

If you went and said propulsion, a weight and balance guy might say your engine is too heavy/too powerful and has a poor location relative to the location on the airframe (ahem).

Complaining about avionics bays and the space that it occupies might be the job of the landing gear people, who mutter about those large cable bundles that run through their section to another part of the aircraft.

The electrics guy keeps a length of cable spare for the hydraulics guy, and the monkey wrench in the toolbox looks like it has another non-productive use, that usually involves zip ties and blankets.

Seriously of course, relationships are the heart and soul of any program or project, Poor relations mean low morale, low productivity, lack of interest and motivation.

"Lets get the job done'' we tell ourselves, a job well done is its own reward. However, pressure is not the deadline, pressure is the stress within the individual. Work plays a very integral part in life, whether we like it or not, we dedicate our time and talent, to produce great things, but sometimes this can go awry.

Everyone is afraid of pink paper.

Life rewards people unfairly,  but that is a risk that many have no choice but to accept.

The difference is humility, knowing your limits and knowing your self. If you really can't do what the other guy did, you can always ask them to show you, unless its not part of your job, and even then knowledge never hurt anyone, unless it was misused.

The whole of organization, is based on the collective productivity of the whole. Criticism of its workings is an essential part of the process, allowing things to be organized better or to weed out any ill conceived practices and ideas. In short, someone has to be the bad guy.

A career in Engineering assumes much. We are told we are working for a common purpose. That purpose is to develop our product or complete our project. We assume that the work done to the best of our abilities is the best solution, whence alas it may not. We assume much of our co-workers and our boss, hoping that there is a common ground shared by all. Except that this hope is the bane of competitiveness, and sometimes produces poor work not fit for use.

One has to love the work, but in the sterile conditions of the engineering office, that leaves nothing to be inspired, most persons can only feel the build-up of stress. It takes a special person the be an engineer, and a very gifted person to be a good one. The best engineers have a patience to wait their turn and prefer being the underdog and thus to shirk responsibility, until that that responsibility is given to them exclusively. They are actually very good poker players.

Life as an engineer isn't so cut and dried. In the medical profession, your failings as a doctor are countered by the efforts made to save your patient, and sometimes this is a futile exercise. In engineering, it was always just reckoning, and seeing whose idea was best, relative to the costs. In the sciences, a hypothesis need not be correct provided that there were arguments that would show the holes in the theory, despite our efforts of course. In engineering, the theory has already been figured out. Your job is to use that theory to make good on it, to see if there is something that can be made from it.  The are many more comparisons, but I can't list them all here,

Perhaps the best any engineer can do, is to make the best of the situation as presented, and sometimes that means sticking up for your design and taking charge of your turf. Sometimes it means going against the consensus, because you know that there is a better solution out there. Sometimes it means that you have to surrender in the face of an enlightened experience whose know how is far greater than the groups collective.

Whatever the arguments, perhaps the the best thing any engineer can realistically do, is to continue to be, just an ordinary engineer.

Just desserts

 Its time to get medieval in here.

Remember 10 years ago what people were saying about the 747 program back then?

That it was an uneconomical airplane, past its prime, That it had no more future in the industry, That it was no good as an airplane.

Well, a Mr. STC of EK airlines might be having buyers remorse. You see having over committed to the whalejet program and telling the whole world about his disdain for the type by not even buying the freighter version, you can best believe his interests have been damaged by his arrogant oversimplification of the circumstances of the market he is in. He is paying the price of driving forward without a rear view mirror.

Yes its true, that this moment will not last forever, but it will last for significantly longer, to which anything can happen. The market is shot, everyone in it is doing either or and there will be winners and losers. Any freight capability you had back then is so worth it, now. Shortsighted planning and Bias is the only explanation.

Look at it from this perspective, if anytime would be right to go in and make a pitch, it would be Right Now. What is up in the air here?

Sell STC 747's of course, tell him its a replacement offering a middle ground between the 777 and whalejet. Offer him a PIP package, with better range, also sell him a bunch of freighters. Tell them the engine type is common with the 787 that they ordered. Tell him also, that in the future when he is fed up with it he can dump it on the 2nd hand market to somebody who wants a P2F converted freighter. You can offer him a Combi too.

Does this sound Crazy?

Whats the goal of this? To ensure that in future, that his company has a large plane that is more versatile than current offerings. 

Lets face it people, versatility is still a selling point here. The 77X has no cargo version. The Whalejet is dead, and cargo is the winner, having yielded price increases sometimes over the 100 percent margin. If he had bought 748s back then he could dump then them into a P2F today and still make money selling his excess capacity whilst everybody else is paying parking fees.

Online of course, one can see the various pictures of 77Ws, whalejets,787's and A330's sitting in the sun and going nowhere, racking up fees and requiring a monitoring and maintenence program to boot. How much more money is to be spent making them fit to fly again? Goodness knows.

In fact, there are DC-8's coasting around carrying cargo because of its capability and nothing else and whilst the belly freight offered cost reductions, look at how it has hamstrung the cargo industry today. The dedicated freighters are overbooked, and dinosaurs are coming back to life to fill the void.

This is it, a whole industry in utter denial and refusing to believe in an alternate universe.  

It is a sad state of affairs and just shows up the fact that these well intended designs were configured to do only one thing and one thing only: To allow airlines to stitch pax of their money and make CEOs very happy, always adjusting of course, for inflation.

G Triumph talk.

 Everyone knows about the Triumph talk of closing down the contract for 747 parts. If the program was really coming to a close, then why is it, that we haven't heard similar calls from other subcontractors? Some of whom make some very complicated components indeed.

Well the answer is quite straightforward.

Every Airplane program has its own supply chain. In the case of the 747 there is quite a number of parts, but the most of these parts are spare parts that you can acquire, meaning that BCA is only one of several customers for that part, or component. The manufacturer of that part can sell them direct to the user, so a constant supply of orders is available for manufacturing to continue. This does not apply to large pieces like skin panels and cockpits etc. These are structural parts. There is only 1 customer and that is BCA.

So what is the gripe here?

Manufacturing depends a lot on volume. The more you can make on a given day, the cheaper the part, largely due to the division of overhead costs of all parts produced that day. Now for a subcontractor like Triumph, it would be the best case scenario for them to make as many shipsets as possible on a given day, that way the overhead is spread out over the number of sets being made.

However, with a rate of six per year, the cost to produce the shipsets might be higher because the overhead is not being divided sufficiently for them to make a reasonable margin on those parts. Add to that storage costs, because of the low rate and you can see why the ink might be turning red. The manufacturing rate of 2 per month, may have been a breaking point because at least 2 of the shipsets, would be becoming parts of a plane, and whatever shipsets being made would have a shorter waiting period before assembly.

High production costs and low turnover rates plus storage fees, hurt the bottom line are is the death rattle of any manufacturer. 

So what is the solution?

A higher rate of course. Increasing the rate to 2 per month, might bring the program end sooner, but also it would shorten the lead time to delivery. There is a longshot, but if the need was really dire, a few more frames made at 2 per month, with an order from a NEW customer might be the grace the will save the program. This could be a benchmark and even if the could only manage a handful of orders, the program could end on a higher note, rather than the confused dithering doldrums we hear coming out of the cavernously empty production hall.

Bring back my Bonnie to me (to me)...

 Ahhh Yes....

The carbonara-liner.

What a sorry old crate it is becoming.

The fact that it has sold well in numbers is a good thing, that it has changed the hub and spoke forever, is an even greater accomplishment and that it has taken over the world is the greatest thing it has achieved, it is a great airplane in this regard.

However what is the kind of program that produced it, and would you say that it is a good program? I will keep my opinion to myself, but time and again, I keep hearing the news. Is this good optics? Is this the state of affairs that is 'acceptable'. I cannot answer that question. I will leave it to the experts. 

If one were an expert, an artisan of technologies, what kind of criticism would you level at an enterprise such s this? Could you make an assessment? If you wore a lanyard, and clocked into its factory, is your morale high? Do you still feel a sense of pride? One can hope that you do.

Whether we like it or not, this is the future of BCA. Forget the NMA talk for now. Its time to ask tough questions about the current state of affairs, queen or no queen. 

You see, even if the NMA is a single aisle clone of the Dreamliner, and that it can deliver on its promises, the last thing that anyone on that program wants is a repeat of that mess. The problems might be deep rooted cultural issues or perhaps some sort of deep complacency?

True or not, every manager or department head would be wise to ask those hard questions, especially in an industry with few sentiments to go in between. After the MAX issues, there should be a healthy environment of skepticism among the keepers of the faith; without which BCA can just forget about making new planes. Who would want to buy them, if they just keep falling apart?

The fall of every Great Company begins when it turns its back on its Principles.

I have never walked the hall where a legend was made even though I have a great Appreciation and Love for it. I read a book, built scale models, sat in its belly an loved it for all that it was worth. My experiences add up to very little and have no bearing on the future.

Likewise, I could write here, dire warnings of the future, but realistically, it matters not. There is a greater wisdom out there that will reward complacency faster that anyone can write about it. To those who believe in the work of making the future, it is their livelihood on the table and they can be part of that future or not.

These here days, are dark times and one had best believe in silver linings.

 

New 747 variant being planned.

Happy April's Fool everybody.

How we would wish for it to be true.😋😋.

Now that would be a real dreamliner.