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One of my uncles has worked for Bell, Boeing, and Lockheed for the last 30 years. The mechanical complexity of aircraft, and the ability for a blue collar worke
by iplaw 9y ago
One of my uncles has worked for Bell, Boeing, and Lockheed for the last 30 years. The mechanical complexity of aircraft, and the ability for a blue collar worker to master a niche aerospace trade, never ceases to amaze me.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoWhat amazes me is that 50 years ago a plane like the SR-71 was designed on paper and turned out amazing. Fast forward to today and you have the over-engineered piece of expensive garbage that is the F-35.
- MagnumOpus 9y ago> SR-71 was designed on paper and turned out amazing Well, "amazing" is relative - it was a hastily constructed leaking bucket of kerosene, and within the first five years of its first sorties, one third of the planes have crashed and burned. Not even Lockheed's other famous death trap - the F-104 Lawn Dart - was as dangerous as the SR-71. (And of course the F-35 is supposed to be doing every single job under the sun rather than having a single purpose - hence it being outperformed by its Chinese single-purpose carbon copies already.)