4 ms·
Here's my theory. The engineers assumed it would never occur because they fail rarely and if one failed you'd replace the unit. Then it got into the hands of t
by xanderstrike 10y ago
Here's my theory. The engineers assumed it would never occur because they fail rarely and if one failed you'd replace the unit.
Then it got into the hands of the airlines and they said, "You mean it'll run with one failed accelerometer? Then we don't need to replace it when one fails."
- Jtsummers 10y agoIf they were even aware that it'd run with one failed accelerometer. Aircraft maintenance outside the US military (Air Force in particular) terrifies me. While it's not perfect, the USAF essentially rebuilds most of its fleet every X years. There's a reason they're flying planes, successfully, from 60 years [ago]. [EDIT: Missing a word.] The airline industry does not do this sort of depot level work. Instead, they discover a crack, the put on a piece of sheet aluminum and "patch" it. Wash, rinse, repeat. 10 years later the aircraft is still flying but at greatly reduced fuel efficiency because, like an overweight, middle-aged man, it's gotten a bit of extra weight on it all the damn time. This is what they do for structural maintenance. I don't even want to imagine what happens with electronics and other subsystems. They're literally willing to cost themselves millions of dollars a year in extra fuel consumption (across their fleet), rather than spend the money to do real maintenance on it.
- mahyarm 10y agoSo what does the USAF do when they find a crack? If they do rebuilds it sounds like it takes a lot more time to do the same fix.
- Jtsummers 10y agoThey monitor and patch it but eventually the plane gets stripped down to basically the frame and rebuilt. Their patches are treated as temporary patches. The airline industry has a bad habit of making them effectively permanent.