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Troublesome advanced engines for Boeing and Airbus jets have disrupted airlines
- akhilcacharya 8y agoIt's interesting how the term "disrupt" has been overloaded these days because the headline gave me a different impression than the article.
- berkut 8y agoThousands of passengers' flights / holidays have been affected: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12038034 https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&... And that's just one airline - how is that not disruption?
- freeone3000 8y agoBecause it doesn't "revolutionize" an industry by introducing venture capital-funded competitors with a new type of smartphone app.
- cup-of-tea 8y agoThis stupid thing American journalists do with avoiding the word "and" in headlines really makes them difficult to read sometimes.
- userbinator 8y agoCertainly, I read the headline in a completely different meaning --- Boeing's engines are having trouble, and airlines are switching to Airbus instead.
- ghaff 8y agos/journalists/headline writers
- agumonkey 8y agowow indeed
- greglindahl 8y agoThe Seattle Times headline had 'and' in it originally, look at the url! In this case, the way you interpreted the headline is ungrammatical; a comma is not a semi-colon.
- sctb 8y agoAlright, we've expanded the headline.
- theNJR 8y agoWas this article written by a bot? WTF sentences.
- IncRnd 8y agoIndeed. It's difficult to read this article.
- sgt101 8y agoI remember watching a documentary about the design of the trent 1000 and being amazed by how small the team was. In fact it was held up where I work as a demonstration of how inefficient we are. But now we see the consequence of penny pinching short sighted know nothing accountants running a company. How much has this cost in contrast to an extra 20 engineers on the team?
- nixgeek 8y agoI’m not sure adding 20 more engineers guarantees these problems don’t happen. There is very little substitute for real experience running a design for millions of flight hours, as the article points out.
- AdamM12 8y agoMakes me wonder if they are developing talent for the next generation or are we gonna have a similar issue as farmers in the US (avg age is like 65)? Albeit the job is more attractive .
- greglindahl 8y agoWhat fraction of airplane engines are produced in companies that look like family farms? If you look at aerospace, the craziest rocket company (RocketLab) looks like it has an average age much less than NASA, with SpaceX in the middle. Which is about what you would expect.
- AdamM12 8y agoIt was a pretty loose comparison and only used it to allude to my question. Mainly was noting how OP said they were a really small team and very experienced. Also discussing jet turbines at nearly century old companies not start ups.
- greglindahl 8y agoI used a related aerospace field because I don't think any "new" companies produce airplane jet turbines -- the newest ones are joint ventures of older companies. However, the examples do produce rocket engines, whose preburners are turbines.
- wensley 8y agoCan't read with an ad-blocker enabled.
- JackCh 8y agoYou need a better ad-blocker. uMatrix/uBlock Origin works perfectly on this page.
- mirimir 8y agoFriendlier article: https://www.fliegerfaust.com/airbus-boeing-engines-problems-2578418376.html https://www.fliegerfaust.com/airbus-boeing-engines-problems-...
- mirimir 8y ago... but truncated, and missing the part about the Philadelphia accident.
- scottmcdot 8y agoThis is 'disruption' in the operational sense?
- rosser 8y agoThe airlines are having to pull massively CapEx equipment (the price tag on a 787-9 is well over a quarter billion dollars) out of their fleets to have the IPC turbine blades on their engines replaced — using a temporary fix, which will require them to be pulled from service yet again, once the permanent fix is vetted. Of course they mean "disruption" in the operational sense. I see no basis on which to infer the Silly Valley sense of the term here.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> Silly Valley I hope that typo was intentional, because it’s accurate.
- rosser 8y agoIt is. I don't remember where I picked it up, but I've been using it for years.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoLove it, thanks for sharing.
- southern_cross 8y agoSillycon Valley is how I have long referred to it.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 8y agoShamefully my default assumption was this would be about something good. The SV speak had almost made me forget the original meaning of the word isn’t always positive.
- hotdog97 8y agoHere's a light-hearted comparison between the airline and PC world: Motherboard/integration - Boeing/Airbus - a bunch of Taiwanese conglomerates, but the core design comes from Intel OS - Boeing/Airbus - Microsoft/Apple CPU/Engine - Rolls-Royce/GE - Intel RAM/fuel - Saudi Aramco/etc - Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron .. I don't know if it's useful in any way, but I found it interesting to do this exercise.
- StanislavPetrov 8y agoClearly its not that advanced if it doesn't work properly. Perhaps they shouldn't try to rush out prototypes that are incomplete before the kinks are worked out.
- na85 8y agoRushing out prototypes without working out the kinks sounds like the behaviour of every javascript project ever.
- jackweirdy 8y agoVirgin Atlantic were/are still so disrupted that they ended up buying 4 A330-200 aircraft to fill the void in fleet schedules this summer as all of their B787 use affected engines. (For reference they have a fleet of <40 aircraft in the first place) It’s such a difference in scale that engineering oversights in the design of engine blades leads down a road that brings you to buying whole planes to get around the problem
- mirimir 8y agoSo is this the problem that led to the recent engine failure, and passenger death? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/southwest-airlines-jennifer-riordan-pasenger-window-sucked-engine-explosion-passenger-philadelphia-a8309891.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/southwest-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860902
- dingo_bat 8y agoThey talk about this in TFA. That was a really old engine.
- staunch 8y ago> safety agencies now limit Dreamliners powered by one of the Trent 1000 engine models under scrutiny to flying no more than 2.3 hours from the nearest airport — down from 5.5 hours previously. This seems like what these agencies should be doing anyway. Why allow a plane to be 5.5 hours from an emergency landing at all? That's just an insane amount of time if there's a major problem. I absolutely hate it when I'm flying over the middle of pacific. It has always seemed insane to me. I don't see how an engineer would ever recommend being even 2.3 hours away if it's possible to fly a safer route. There should be regulations requiring airlines to fly the safest reasonable route. If it adds even 25% to the flight, so be it. An abundance of caution seems logical.
- ben_w 8y agoDespite the ambiguous text, Dreamliners have two engines. I don’t know the rules, but imagine one engine failing means “go straight to nearest airport on remaining engine”. If you can’t trust that the remaining engine will work for at least as long as the scheduled flight, even a money-maximising-sociopath would recognise bigger problems.
- techrich 8y agoI agree with you 100% why would you be 5 hours from an emergency landing?! That's crazy! I would rather sit on a plane for a few more hours, should anything happen you can land some place in a reasonable amount of time.
- vladimirralev 8y agoYou have to know these guys have earned their right to stay 5.5h out of range with a safety record. A longer flight also means more expensive. There is a calculation showing once you increase the price too much people start taking other less-safe transportation which results in more deaths and more GDP lost in terms of business. While this doesn't directly correlate here with pacific flights, I am sure they've done the same calculation for this case too.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sunstone 8y agoInteresting article but wow what a power pig that page is.