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The recent failures of Boeing and this story underscore how very, very, very, very difficult it is to build a modern airliner. I'm hard pressed to come up with
by JackFr 7y ago
The recent failures of Boeing and this story underscore how very, very, very, very difficult it is to build a modern airliner.
I'm hard pressed to come up with any other product which has as many complex interacting systems, requiring expertise in aerodynamics, materials science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software, UX design among other things, with very little margin for error. Honestly they're kind of amazing.
- hangonhn 7y agoThis is sort of one of the metrics James Fallows outlined in his book, "China Airborne". In order to build a competitive airliner, it requires integration of so many discipline: metallurgy, software, aeronautics, engineering, etc. He argues that when China can build a competitive airliner, their development can be said to have to be on par with the West.
- brenden2 7y agoIt's worth noting that Brazil[1] has been exporting aircraft for quite some time, although it's still regarded as 3rd world. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer
- inferiorhuman 7y agoThat's almost cheating given Santos-Dumont's role in the origins of aviation. That said I don't think there are any modern, high bypass turbofans coming out of Brazil. China will need those if they hope to have a fully homegrown solution.
- TylerE 7y ago3rd world doesn’t mean poorly developed. It just means not 1st world (NATO countries) or 2nd (Soviet Bloc)
- alicorn 7y agoBrasil has benefitted a lot from technology exchange with Saab. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept, the idea ,(very simplified) is that Brasil buys a lot of Saab planes, and in return gets knowledge about latest Swedish advances in the field. And Sweden, while perhaps not best in class, builds decent military planes, and I assume at least some of the knowledge is transferable to civil applications as well.
- mikeyouse 7y agoNoah Smith has a theory that one of the best ways to develop a country that’s nearing an inflection point is to commit to building something like this. His example is a coastal African country committing to building an Aircraft Carrier. You would need to develop advanced capabilities across a dozen industries and it could realistically kickstart competition in every one of those areas as the local skills level up. It’s a provocative but plausible idea in my opinion.
- lazylizard 7y agoI always had the imagination that the aircraft carrier wasn't that hard. The planes that can operate from the carrier. I imagined were harder.
- mikeyouse 7y agoI think you'd need a few orders of magnitude more skilled workers to build a carrier vs. building a new airframe. I think the end skills will be much more useful to a developing economy as well (since they're better suited to heavy industry vs. more technical skills when developing a plane) but I could definitely be wrong there.
- blackrock 7y agoThat was a very good book to read. As a quick summary: Boeing is commendable on pushing China’s aviation industry to adopt international safety standards, as well as certain key Chinese individuals that wanted China to improve themselves and be on par with international norms. The key here, is that the international norms and safety standards were established by the FAA and American industries. But to be politically neutral and more palatable, it was rephrased as “international standards”. But, Boeing’s goal was to improve the safety of China’s aviation industry, in order to avoid being caught up in bad press for one of their planes crashing, because of poor maintenance. And they figured by improving the safety, more people in China would fly, and thus buy more Boeing airplanes. It was a nice virtuous cycle for Boeing. The interesting thing, is that it appears the student has now become the master, and China adopted all the international standards from Boeing, and added more of their own, that they became even stricter, and more rigorous in their safety inspections and protocols. And over the past 2 decades, their statistical safety record is better than their international peers. And also, the other fascinating thing about the history of Boeing. Their first engineer was Wong Tsu, and he designed Boeing’s first commercial plane, the Model C water plane. This was instrumental to Boeing’s commercial success. Wong Tsu was born in China, and studied at MIT during the dawn of the airplane age. It seems the United States and China have a lot of connections going back in history.
- jmole 7y agokey word being modern. it's easy, with today's tools, to build a plane that flies and carries passengers. it's very hard to continue pushing the bleeding-edge of fuel and cost-efficiencies.
- proc0 7y agoIndeed, one of the few exceptions is basically a faster version of the product that goes to space.
- texasbigdata 7y agoSpace shuttle? :)
- WalterBright 7y ago> any other product You can design a car with very little math. An airplane requires a lot of math. A spacecraft - everything is math, because the margins are awfully slim.
- WalterBright 7y agoBy the way, a huge reason the Wrights were successful with their 1903 Flyer and the others weren't was because they did the math, and the others were doing trial and error. Or more accurately, just error :-) The Wrights are often dismissed as mere "bicycle mechanics", but they were anything but "mere".
- serf 7y ago>You can design a car with very little math. I'm not trying to make it seem like car design is a higher class of work than it is, but a car designed with little math isn't going to run in any meaningful manner. Margins/thresholds for design scope exist everywhere.
- WalterBright 7y ago> I'm not trying to make it seem like car design is a higher class of work than it is, but a car designed with little math isn't going to run in any meaningful manner. I've seen a lot of custom cars built. No math was used.