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1. Woggy's Zeonic Frolicks (washedoutgundampilot@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 14-May-2024 09:32:07 JST Woggy's Zeonic Frolicks

   in reply to

   @VaxxSabbath @mikerotch @deprecated_ii I'll ask around about this, because it touches on some of the chats I've had.

   BIG problem I've heard from 2 smaller aircraft manufacturing managers: Much of their knowledge is utterly lost, irrevocably. This is made much worse than it has to be because of the type certification process.

   Once you get a TC for a design, it's more or less set in stone. It's a grievously expensive and difficult process, in the sense that someone has to pay the bills and get a return on their investment - this process is generally a money loser though, so pretty much nobody wants to actually go through with it. (ICON didn't even get a full cert and they're going to bankruptcy court this month, and all they did was a 2-seat seaplane. Textron did a twin commuter, but I suspect they'll regret it since the twin otter returned, those are some of the more high-profile ones OTOMH)

   That results in everyone building aircraft designs that were drafted in the 60's, on blueprints, with a mountain of institutional knowledge left in employee's heads, and never adequately transferred to paper. For decades, they managed to make it work by digitizing, updating, and teaching the new guys but the guys who learned it all from working up from the bottom run are now retiring (forced out in boeing's case).

   Management has little interest in establishing or codifying knowledge transfer, and even if they DID they can't keep people around long enough for it to be of any use. Even tougher for bigger designs, because they end up subcontracting out and having someone else do modules. (Telling that boeing wants to rejoin with Spirit, who was spun off years ago to "save money". Many of their issues stem from spirit's shoddy workmanship and oversight in the last few years.)

   The real-ish solution under your scheme is to train engineers (which PM's wouldn't approve of but that's a separate thing, what they dislike is that kids are "trained" but ultimately worthless, little experience with IRL mechanic's work so they come up with convoluted, expensive, inefficient systems that are difficult to work on for end users. Add in a 3-year apprenticeship as an AMT and you'd have a solid engineer at the end of his 4-yr), BUT have them create new aircraft from scratch so that the entire process is recorded, captured, and codified from the outset. Then you start the cycle anew.

   Then again, we supposedly did that with the F-22 and it didn't work at all, even WITH orders to keep the tooling and thoroughly document the build to restart the line at will.