Excessive Modularity Hindered Development of the 787

TAGmclaren writes "The Harvard Business Review is running a fascinating article exploring the issues facing Boeing's Dreamliner. Rather than simply blaming outsourcing, as much of the commentary has been focused on, the article delves into the benefits of integration and how being integrated when developing a new product gives engineers more degrees of freedom. From the article: 'Historically, Boeing understood that, and had worked with its subcontractors on that basis. If it was going to rely on them, it would provide them with detailed blueprints of the parts that were required — after Boeing had already created them. That, in turn, meant that Boeing had to design all the relevant pieces of the puzzle itself, first. But with the 787, it appears that Boeing tried a very different approach: rather than having the puzzle solved and asking the suppliers to provide a defined puzzle piece, they asked suppliers to create their own blueprints for parts. The puzzle hadn't been properly solved when Boeing asked suppliers for the pieces. It should come as little surprise then, that as the components came back from far-flung suppliers, for the first plane ever made of composite materials... those parts didn't all fit together. Time and cost blew out accordingly. It's easy to blame the outsourcing. But, in this instance, it wasn't so much the outsourcing, as it was the decision to modularize a complicated problem too soon.'"

Comments

No specs?

[BVis]

So Boeing told the contractors what they needed to build, but didn't give them hard specifications? What the hell? Two things:

Boeing needs to have their collective asses kicked for doing it this way, and:
The subcontractors should never have agreed to the work without specs first.

The first one is probably the result of Boeing not wanting to spend the engineering dollars to develop the blueprints, and the second is due to the enormous amounts of money involved in making the parts.

Now that I know this, you'll never catch me on one of those abominations. What the hell was Boeing thinking?

Re:No specs?

[bunratty]

No, the problem wasn't no specs. The problem was that the system was designed on paper first, without actually building it. Then the specs for the individual pieces were created, and those individual modules were built from the specs. The idea was that then the parts were completed, they would be integrated and work perfectly together. Of course, that never happens because when the pieces come together for the first time, unanticipated problems occur. This is why early integration is a good idea and is part of the philosophy of release early, release often.

Re:No specs?

[MyLongNickName]

I actually logged in for this response...

Do you REALLY think that is accurate? Do you really think Boeing put the plane together with a bunch of non-spec'd parts? Do you really think that a plane would get off the ground with that type of engineering? Seriously?

An MBA put his two cents together and came up with a penny and you bought it. Most likely there was a lot of back and forth over specification early in the project as prototypes were being built. That does not translate into substandard final designs.

The 787 is cutting edge and the result of some seriously advanced engineering. I would think Slashdot of all places would appreciate that.

Re:No specs?

[ledow]

Boeing, maybe.

But if the subcontractors did what was asked (just that what was asked wasn't precisely what was required), then they've done their job. Changes after the initial sign-off, even though your product matches the specs originally given? That's going to cost you big time.

And every time you change one, you affect all the other contractors and their changes affect you and so on. Hence costs spiral, and you end up with something that may not even be fit for purpose. But, hey, at least you can blame the contractors for not delivering a working final product, even though they did exactly what was asked.

Just ask the UK NHS IT contractors how that all works.

Re:No specs?

[vakuona]

Completely agreed. Now, I know that making a phone is not the same as making a plane, but when Apple creates a new iPhone, they make the whole thing in the US first, test it, refine it, then ask manufacturers to build it to specs they know will work.

Maybe such a development process would be too expensive for a plane, I don't know, but it sure makes it easy to figure out what isn't working properly.

Any manufacturer worth their salt (and Boeing is one) should be able to fully prototype their product prior to outsourcing bits of its production (except for things like batteries). But any parts that needs to fit together very precisely should be prototyped first.

Re:No specs?

[BVis]

I stand corrected. Maybe I should read linked articles first..

But, I still think it was a case of being penny wise and pound foolish. If I read you correctly, they saved some money by not building the prototype themselves, but then got bit on the ass by the fact that that's a really bad idea and lost money in the long run. Typical corporate thinking. If it costs less TODAY, then that's what you do.

Re:No specs?

[idontgno]

This.

I'm a systems engineer, which means that integration is pretty much the only reason my job exists... for projects (hardware/software/everything) which are too big to continuously integrate. Projects that are modularized by design, and very often subcontracted as well.

If the first time you're integrating your product is the first production run, you're too late. You should have had a prototype. You should treat the first production samples AS prototypes. (The wisdom of the "never buy the zero revision of anything" is in this.)

But, yeah, that's expensive. It's cheaper to assume that every subassembly will be perfectly built to perfect specifications, and that interfaces just magically happen, and that integration is just sticking the pieces together and turning a few screws.

Re:No specs?

[BVis]

Do you REALLY think that is accurate? Do you really think Boeing put the plane together with a bunch of non-spec'd parts? Do you really think that a plane would get off the ground with that type of engineering? Seriously?

I think that if the bean counters decided that was a good idea, and gave it to the engineers to work on with inadequate support, it's possible that the engineers, being responsible and ethical, made the impossible happen through serious overwork.

If I understand bunratty's response above, it sounds like there were never any prototypes actually built.

Re:No specs?

[vlm]

rather than having the puzzle solved and asking the suppliers to provide a defined puzzle piece, they asked suppliers to create their own blueprints for parts. The puzzle hadn't been properly solved when Boeing asked suppliers for the pieces.

Using some computer science-lite language their design and physical parts "networks" used to be a hub-n-spoke topology. That has always worked pretty well. This time around they tried something like a fully connected mesh for design (because in real world engineering, unlike CS, practically everything affects everything) but they maintained the hub-n-spoke topology for physical parts. There's a bit of a mismatch there.

I believe the hope -n- dream was forcing the subs to mesh with every other sub would result in outsourcing that huge design workload to the subs, on the assumption the subs:
1) Could do it (uhhhh commissioned salesperson says yes, R+D says no Fing way)
2) Would want to do it, hoping taking the hit during design means they'll get production contracts (vs telling Boeing to F off and hoping for airbus subcontracts instead)

So what happens when you make the leap of faith that your subcontractors will care more about your product than apparently you do? Well, it isn't pretty.

There's also a hubris effect. Lets try new tech throughout an entire plane AND a completely new R+D model at the same time. What could go wrong? Now if they were doing R+D for something really "boring" like yet another generic mp3 player, or yet another water heater, the new development experiment probably would have worked. Or if they tried a mostly new technology plane with the traditional development process, it probably would have worked. But both at the same time? In a price sensitive commercial market (unlike .mil or .gov contracts) ? Not looking good. The company might survive, it might even turn out OK in the end, but its kinda like picking up nickles in front of a steamroller, just not wise at all.

Re:No specs?

[tibit]

When it comes to mechanical parts, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing is a solved problem. When it comes to electrical interoperability, one'd think that's a solved problem as well. Someone, or many someones at Boeing and/or at the subcontractors don't know their engineering, that's all.

Re:No specs?

[catchblue22]

This gives yet more evidence of the flawed nature of the MBA ideology of management methods being independent from the technical processes of what is actually being managed. There is no substitute for hard won knowledge slogging through the real details of industrial processes. I have said it before, and I'll say it again: the cult-like ideology of MBA managers is driving America into the ground.

Re:No specs?

[gstoddart]

This is why early integration is a good idea and is part of the philosophy of release early, release often

For software, sure ... but when you're talking about physical things, "release early release often" falls apart.

With something like a 787, you'd sure as heck never be able to do things like that.

By the time you have your first version, you expect to be able to put a pilot into it and at least taxi it around and look at flying.

Rapid release cycles of partly completed software is fine, but it just doesn't apply to an aircraft I don't think. In software, we know we'll release shit intermediate versions only meant for us -- I don't think you can do that with an aircraft.

Re:No specs?

[shadowrat]

sounds like agile aeronautics to me. You hear these horror stories all the time. Now the problem isn't with the methodology, it's in the execution. You need the client 100% on board with the process. You need to stick to your scrums. You need to add new functionality requests to the pool and allow your timeline to shift.

Re:No specs?

[CaptNoobius]

Nope -- that's not how it works...... For the past decade at least, Airframers/Assemblers such as Boeing bring suppliers on-sight during what they typically refer to Joint Definition Phase. Essentially this is when the aircraft subsystem specifications are developed. the suppliers are on site through at least critical design review and work side by side with Boeing engineers to develop system level and component level specifications. Often times this is even before a contract has been awarded to the suppliers... Reasons for this: 1) Benefit to Boeing... they get a specification that they know can be produced and they get the expertise of the suppliers. Avionic engineers know avionics, etc. 2) Benefit to Suppliers... they know when the specification goes out to bid for contract, it is in a form of which they can meet and competitively bid on it. Often times there is more than one supplier for a particular component or system working with the airframer to keep things competitive. Been this way for at least a decade..... those on the automotive side know the same drill.

Re:No specs?

[vlm]

Having lived for over 5 years in Japan, I doubt the Japanese subcontractors would build anything without clear specifications.

The problem is the toilet seat bracket had to be made 1/10 mm thicker for supersized passengers, and that was properly annotated by the seat mfgr on blueprint revision #24352. Unfortunately the news never reached the design engineers for the landing gear who need to adjust blueprint revision #7652 foward by 2 mm

My extensive experience with electronic design is if the Chinese say they'll give you a container full of old fashioned thru hole 1K resistors at a tenth of a penny each or whatever they will in fact do so. Maybe they painted the resistor color code with lead paint and the assembly line workers are political prisoners, but the resistance and power dissipation specs will be more or less as per the data sheet. And you can talk the Indonesians into providing a container full of microwave medium power bipolar transistors with a Pd of one watt and a Ft of 25 GHz for two bucks each and they will in fact do it. But god help you if you tell both of them, "I'd like a class A biased driver amp assembly so you two kids cooperate mkay?" Now multiply that by one zillion subcontractors all operating more or less without adult oversight by design to save money as a new project management technique, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

"I've got an idea, lets improve the obvious metrics, then you little guys can work together to design and build it which will make me a bunch of money, mkay?" That stuff doesn't fly.

Re:No specs?

[N0Man74]

Well there is a difference between theory and practice

At least in theory.

Re:No specs?

[Richard_at_work]

Aside from the intent of the article, Boeing did indeed put together the first 787 with non-specced parts - in their haste to make the 07-08-2007 roll out date (7-8-7), Boeing failed to order aviation grade fasteners with enough lead time from their suppliers and they literally had to buy a batch from your every day DIY store, and replace them at great cost and effort afterward. One of the reasons the first four 787s have been written off and will never be sold (the original intent was to sell all the certification fleet to customers).

Re:No specs?

[alexgieg]

Of course, that never happens because when the pieces come together for the first time, unanticipated problems occur.

This, IMHO, is also the central difference between science and engineering, and why the former doesn't translate directly into the later. A scientific theory describes a sequence of causes and effects that's valid for an isolated system. So, while every theory can be absolutely true within its experimental constraints, the moment you take more than one and try to make both work together, all those ignored parameters start showing their ugly heads. Or, put another way:

* Scientific Basis: Theory_1, Theory_2, Theory_3, ...
* Naively Engineered Stuff: Theory_1 + Theory_2 + Theory_3 + ... + Huge_WTF

Refined theories, computer models and tons upon tons of practice can ease the whole endeavor a lot, so that with a team of experience engineers it becomes something more like this:

* Wisely Engineered Stuff: Theory_1 + Theory_2 + Known_WTF_1_2 + Theory_3 + Known_WTF_1_3 + Known_WTF_2_3 + Known_Extra_WTF_1_2_3 + Theory_4 + ... + Remaining_WTF

That last bit, however, will be there no matter what, and you'll only figure it out by actually building the damn thing and iterating over it, no two ways about it.

Re:No specs?

[AC-x]

No, the problem wasn't no specs. The problem was that the system was designed on paper first, without actually building it. Then the specs for the individual pieces were created, and those individual modules were built from the specs. The idea was that then the parts were completed, they would be integrated and work perfectly together. Of course, that never happens because when the pieces come together for the first time, unanticipated problems occur. This is why early integration [ibm.com] is a good idea and is part of the philosophy of release early, release often [wikipedia.org].

Isn't that how all modern airliners are created? I'm trying to remember a documentary about the development of the A380, IIRC the entire thing was designed in CAD, the factories were then tooled and the first plane was created from parts from the same production line as the production run would come from.

Now it's a little different with Airbus as they manufactured most parts in their own factories, but I can't see how it would be economically practical to create a completely bespoke prototype aeroplane of the size and complexity of the 787, and even if they did the custom made parts are likely to differ slightly from the parts that eventually role off production. You certainly can't apply "release early, release often" software development methodologies to giant manufacturing projects like this!

Re:No specs?

[P-niiice]

In Appliances, we prototyped, had test samples of new parts build from the production molds, built models for test and test the bejesus out of them. THEN we had two test production runs, tested the heck out of samples of THOSE, then released for production.

Re:No specs?

[Luckyo]

It doesn't apply to anything large and non-physical (like software). You should carefully plan, measure, build, prototype, and only AFTER all this is done, release something.

Releasing something half finished that isn't software typically means a failure of epic proportions. You can't easily fix something that is already built in real world. Only software is easily fixable via patches. In real world, flaws in build can mean anything from having to fully disassemble your build item to actually having to dump whatever it is you built and starting from scratch.

Re:No specs?

[OzPeter]

Isn't that how all modern airliners are created? I'm trying to remember a documentary about the development of the A380, IIRC the entire thing was designed in CAD, the factories were then tooled and the first plane was created from parts from the same production line as the production run would come from.

The Airbus also suffered from manufacturing problems as the German and Spanish facilities were using a different version of the CATIA CAD tool than the English and French facilities. This resulted in hilarity when modules from different locations did not mate as intended.

Re:No specs?

[Luckyo]

It's economically practical once you consider the costs of failure if you do not.

Re:No specs?

[gbjbaanb]

yes you should...

at the end they talk about how management from McDonnel Douglas was possibly to blame because in the takeover several "top" people from McD took over the top posts at Boeing, and these guys had the defence contractor mentality where you spend a little amount on R&D and expect the DoD to keep on handing cash over to you regularly until you can't milk it any longer. That meant that tried to cost-cut as much of the design as possible up front.

I think it says a lot about defence spending than it does premature modularisation.

Re:No specs?

[wjsteele]

I'm not sure where you got that information, but the only problem with the fasteners on the 787 had nothing to do with where they got them... as they are custom designed for this application. It had everything to do with the way they were installed. The problem was that the fasteners were not installed per the specification which caused them to have less holding power than the specifications said.

Those fasteners were designed to hold the composite components to the titanium sub structure, and even in their weakened state were still more than the 1.5x strength factor required. And they NEVER bought them from the hardware store... no hardware store on earth would stock that specific component.

Bill

Re:No specs?

[DerekLyons]

The problem was that the system was designed on paper first, without actually building it.

o.O How exactly are you going to build something without a design to build to? Even if you're going to build a mockup or a prototype, you can't use it to iterate a design that doesn't exist. That being said, designing on paper and then building (or at least a prototype or a mockup) is pretty much how everything in the physical world is built.
 
That being said, Boeing has experience with designing on paper (actually in a computer) without building a mockup (the software tracked weights and balances, provided VR imagery, etc...) and it has worked tolerably well in the past. That design methodology is becoming more and more widespread thanks to computers, which (as with all new technologies) gets better and better with each generation. (Heck, Electric Boat designs and builds new types of nuclear submarines without physical mockups or prototypes nowadays.)
 
And of course the real beauty of digital design is that they can be shipped around the world to subcontractors, and they're much harder to misinterpret when dealing with complex three dimensional parts and systems. Equally, if everyone is using the same design system, you can easily import, track, and share changes and updates to the design made by subcontractors. (Doing so on paper, where in the case of an airplane there can be tens of thousands of drawings scattered anywhere from around the building to around the world, is a herculean task.)

Then the specs for the individual pieces were created, and those individual modules were built from the specs. The idea was that then the parts were completed, they would be integrated and work perfectly together. Of course, that never happens because when the pieces come together for the first time, unanticipated problems occur.

Of course unanticipated problems occur - sometimes major, sometimes minor. The key is to design and manage your systems and processes so as to minimize the unexpected problems. Boeing has done it successfully before, and even outsourced parts of the design work before - what's not entirely clear is why it failed so badly in this case. Mostly it appears that they leaped too far this time and the management processes lagged behind.
 

This is why early integration is a good idea and is part of the philosophy of release early, release often.

Ikea can do that with a spiffy new table lamp, because their early prototypes are (relatively) cheap and even if they have to have a new mold machined can be turned around in a few weeks. When the mockup of a new airplane costs upwards of eight figures and can take months to years to build? Not so much.

Re:No specs?

[Richard_at_work]

It comes from direct involvement in the program, and yes the first 787 rolled out had approximately 60% of its fasteners as installed being non-aviation grade, sourced from the same suppliers as any non-aviation manufacturer would source them - they all had to be drilled out and replaced later on at great cost and effort, using oversized fasteners due to the increased hole size.

As I noted in my original post, Boeing failed to source the correct fasteners with enough lead time from its usual supplier, leading to a massive shortfall against what was needed to achieve the roll out date. The decision was taken to use temporary fasteners where required, without full understanding of what that entailed.

It's also widely documented in industry media from 2007 and 2008.

You are correct in that there was a later issue with installed fasteners, in that they had been installed incorrectly (not countersunk correctly) which led to strength issues, but this is a completely separate issue.

The amount of rework piled on rework is what caused Boeing to write off the first four frames as an R&D cost.

Re:No specs?

[MiG82au]

You tell 'em. Just annotate the drawings with the correct GDT and she'll be right.
Bollocks. I'm sure that's the case when machining a pin to fit in a bush, but it's bit more more complicated when making large assemblies work together when everything is bendy.

Re:No specs?

[MiG82au]

Ironically, Boeing did release early when they showed to the public a plane assembled with temporary fasteners. I don't think it did much good :D

Re:No specs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work in shipbuilding. Systems integration is a BFD in shipbuilding, and you NEVER build prototypes. You can't prototype a $500M product, the first one is a production model. The going consensus in shipbuilding is that you always lose money on the first ship of a class, because there's simply too many things to figure out during the production phase. Numerous attempts have been made to resolve that, but it's simply too hard to account for everything. It seems like Boeing tried to follow this model, but you just have to take into account the teething problems in doing this, there's just no way about it.

I completely get Boeing's perspective on this. It's expensive to design a plane all in-house, with new technology like composites and new systems and all that. They outsourced it (and yes, they outsourcing was the problem despite what the article says) to reduce risk and to manage their cash better, because it shifts the burden of development costs onto the suppliers and reduces that up front burden yourself. This makes great sense on paper, but there are long term problems that if not managed correctly, well, this is the result. Modular design is actually a good thing, they just should have kept it all in house; it would have been much more likely to work well together if the modules were all done int he same factory.

What I find really interesting about the development of the 787 is this runs counter to what Boeing's strategic plan typically is. I was fortunate enough to talk with Boeing's VP in charge of their operations in Asia specifically about outsourcing when doing a project for business school, specifically on outsourcing to China. One of the big risks when outsourcing to other countries is the transfer of technology; in a sense you're transfering your production know-how to a foreign company which plants the seeds of a competitor who may usurp your market dominance in 20 years or so. They were aware of this and prefer to keep certain technologies in-house, as he put it "not giving away the secret sauce". But in this case they did; body construction, wing design, the joining of wing and fuselage; all of that is secret sauce and a big deal in large aircraft manufacturing. All of that was given away, and now you see Japanese heavyweights like Mitsubishi and Kawasaki have a lot of technology to form their own aircraft conglomerate. The Chinese are also making in-roads into this market, which is a challenge to Boeing because China and Southeast Asia are fastest growing airliner markets. He felt confident they didn't give away the best parts, but still I question it, and i wonder how many big airliner manufacturers there will be in the next 20 years. They already contend with Airbus, Embraer is making good in-roads, Russia has combined Tupolev, Sukhoi, Yakolev and Mikoyan Geruvich into a single large aircraft conglomerate United Aircraft Corporation with commerical and military aviation potential, China now just unveiled the C919 from Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), and now the Japanese big guys have what it takes between them to make a joint stock company to build aircraft too.

Re:No specs?

[Chris Mattern]

No, the opposite. "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is".

Re:No specs?

[milkmage]

how can you apply software development philosophies to an aircraft?

iterating and deploying versions of software costs nothing compared to engineering, building, assembling and testing (for hundreds of hours) a flying MACHINE. if a single component has a "fatal error" - you need more engines, airframe, avionics.. etc. something like this MUST be designed and tested using computer modeling at least initially, because full "end to end" testing for every iteration is cost prohibitive... not just in time/money, but the lives of the test crew as well.

the "gold master" version of the 787 was undoubtedly tested, in the air, for thousands of hours before it was put in production, yet none of these problems (presumably) popped up duing flight tests.

if the problems with the 787 were software based, they would be fixed already.

Re:No specs?

[MiG82au]

Most of my experience is with the A380, and the majority of the structure is different from the first few aircraft. Right from the beginning, the 7th aircraft (MSN007) was to be the entry into service aircraft, and the first few aircraft were the test aircraft (some eventually sold to customers after modification). You do not make them in a one-off fashion, because you're also prototyping your production process, but the first aircraft is pretty much a prototype. While the first one is being built and tested, engineers refine loads and the design for later models. I'm not sure if that's what you meant, but to me that's a reasonable amount of early integration and prototyping given the scale of the product.

AFAIK this is standard across the aerospace industry, so roughly the same thing would have happened to the 787. However I did notice during the 787's development that Boeing was introducing a bunch of new technology AND pushing a tight schedule for testing testing/prototyping phase, which I immediately thought was rather optimistic. After their public slagging of the A380 when it had problems, I was looking forward to sitting down with the pop-corn when it's the 787's turn. And here we are :D

Re:No specs?

[garyebickford]

The odd thing is that IIRC Boeing and Lockheed were among the first to design machines (airplanes in their case) entirely in CAD with 3D modeling of the entire plane, including part fitting, wiring, ducting, etc. I would have thought that they would have provided that capability as part of the outsourcing agreements. This problem need not have happened even with the outsourcers doing the part design, if they could also test fit the parts into the 3D design. Perhaps there were proprietary and/or security interests involved that prevented Boeing from allowing that access.

Re:No specs?

[PhillC]

If you mention Embraer, then Bombardier (Dash 8), Saab (200 and 340) and Fokker (F50/60) are probably worth noting as well. They're all next-tier players, but potentially could eat into the lower A320-esque end of EADS and Boeing's market. Throw Antonov in there too, with the AN-124 and AN-225 already in production, and you're at the big end.

I read a really interesting article yesterday about the Indian company, Mahindra, wishing to grow in the aerospace market. They already own GippsAero, which is just a GA manufacturer but it's a start. In the article Boeing notes that another 1000 commercial aircraft will be required in the Indian market by 2020. That's a big space for someone to fill.

Re:No specs?

[DerekLyons]

Any manufacturer worth their salt (and Boeing is one) should be able to fully prototype their product prior to outsourcing bits of its production (except for things like batteries). But any parts that needs to fit together very precisely should be prototyped first.

Welcome to the 21st century, I hope your trip from 1950 was a comfortable one! Here in the 21st century computers have advanced to the point where we don't need to physically prototype things anymore - it can, and has been, done digitally for well over a decade now. In fact, one of the most complex things that man is currently building (a nuclear submarine, something else new to you but take my word on it) are now routinely and successfully designed and built without any physical prototype.
 
Seriously - you and a bunch of other commenters are utterly clueless as to the state-of-the-art of over a decade ago. Boeing has built (IIRC) three new aircraft now (plus major upgrades like the new 747) using completely digital design, visualization, and validation tools. While it's not entirely a mature technology, it's not new and very complex vehicles are and have been in service for years that were designed and built using it.
 
Prototyping persists with smaller items because the requisite systems and software are so expensive, and is enabled by the fact that the teams involved are relatively small and simple, physically located in one place, and the prototypes are relatively cheap and new ones can be turned around (at worst) in a few weeks. On the other hand, a mockup/prototype of something like a nuclear submarine or a major aircraft can cost tens of millions of dollars (or more) and take a year or more to assemble. To assume that the latter must prototype because the former do is... ludicrous at best.
 
The problem here isn't lack of prototyping, it appears that they tried to extend the process too far and the management systems weren't weren't set up properly to handle the new process.

Re:No specs?

[whitroth]

Specs... my late ex, who was an engineer at the Cape for 17 years, told me about the time she received a new module for the Space Station from the Italian team... and IIRC, there were aluminum connectors that were supposed to go to steel connectors. As a metallurgist, among other things, she had a lot to say about that - look up "bimetallic corrosion".

                mark

Re:No specs?

[idontgno]

I used to work in shipbuilding. Systems integration is a BFD in shipbuilding, and you NEVER build prototypes. You can't prototype a $500M product, the first one is a production model. The going consensus in shipbuilding is that you always lose money on the first ship of a class, because there's simply too many things to figure out during the production phase. Numerous attempts have been made to resolve that, but it's simply too hard to account for everything. It seems like Boeing tried to follow this model, but you just have to take into account the teething problems in doing this, there's just no way about it.

You raise good points, all very true, but I'd argue that the shipbuilding model isn't appropriate for aircraft. Each ship is completely unique, even if built from identical plans. Each ship is, effectively, its own prototype, and the entire life-cycle model of a new ship is preloaded with prototype-like activities (fitting out, shakedown, eval, lots and lots of tech rep time aboard).

Airplanes? Not so much. They're much closer to consumer devices in overall engineering and production scope: essentially identical at the airframe and major systems level from article to article.

And frankly, Boeing knows better. The DoD aircraft acquisition model is chock full of prototyping (both exploratory and developmental) and the understanding that the first "production" models are almost prototypes (hence the program phase "Limited Rate Initial Production": "You will build, and we will field, a limited number of your whizzy new F-47 UberRaptor in Air Force Materiel Command flight test squadrons. And we will not turn on full rate production until these initial production aircraft have been exercised fully in flight testing; at the same time, we're going to develop the inital maintenance and operations training regime to support these aircraft in their final operational home. Once the system passes Operational Test and Evaluation at an initial operational assignment, we will turn on full production."

Yes. Defense acquisition processes are very bureaucratic, but at least they retain the understanding that you don't just slam right into full-rate production. A one-year in-house flight test program is almost certainly not enough, especially if you're doing so much subcontracting, and if there's significant technical novelty (like the higher use of all-electric systems with LiPo batteries).

Re:No specs?

[AC-x]

The Airbus also suffered from manufacturing problems as the German and Spanish facilities were using a different version of the CATIA CAD tool than the English and French facilities. This resulted in hilarity when modules from different locations did not mate as intended.

I don't see how making an initial bespoke prototype would have helped with this. An initial custom made part would have been made exactly to design and therefore perfect; the problems at the factory would only have come to light once the production line was tooled and running.

Re:No specs?

[MichaelSmith]

I see different but related issues in software engineering. There is a tendency for developers to want to turn their applications into something like an operating system. So instead of tightly integrated modules it becomes a bundle of modules which theoretically do things and can be thrown together when the application is deployed. The result is that the framework which ties the who lot together becomes very complex, and interactions between the modules become very difficult to understand and test. You get to the point where its modules all over the place and nobody knows exactly what is going on.

Re:No specs?

[bored]

computers have advanced to the point where we don't need to physically prototype things anymore - it can, and has been, done digitally for well over a decade now. In fact, one of the most complex things that man is currently building (a nuclear submarine, something else new to you but take my word on it) are now routinely and successfully designed and built without any physical prototype.

I think your confusing a couple things here. CAD and simulation packages don't alleviate the need to build a "prototype" before mass production manufacturing. There are always kinks in the process, and building a prototype allows you to verify that everything actually works as expected. In fact in the case of the 878, Boeing built a number ( 6 IIRC ) of "prototypes" they just called them "test planes". Its really common to design things, have them pass simulation and manufacturing rule checks only to discover that no one can actually get part A in place between part B and C. So, back to the computer you go. Same thing here, the final 787 production aircraft was significantly lighter than the "test planes".

In the case of one off products like ships, of course no one builds full size prototypes, they never did. But you had better bet they build small pieces to validate their simulation models, or test particularly difficult portions of the design. That is why in "small" production runs like the navy does for subs, the first couple are always bastard children and nearly always end up getting retired early. They tweak small things and by the 2nd or 3rd model it preforms better, and then they build a dozen or so units which are basically identical.

So, yes, computers have changed the dynamics of designing/building something, but the general trend may be described more like, delayed full scale prototyping rather than none at all.

Re:No specs?

[BobAColorado]

Here in the 21st century computers have advanced to the point where we don't need to physically prototype things anymore - it can, and has been, done digitally for well over a decade now.

And here lies a seductive trap. I am a test/characterization engineer. That's where the design simulations pile up against actual characterization data. I have lost track of the number of times a design engineer asked in all seriousness which was correct: the measured data or the simulation. Yes, bad measurements can be made but that's not my point. I see younger engineers that implicitly believe simulation data without questioning the limitations of their models. Some of them do not seem to recognize that a simulation is not reality, no matter how accurate the model. This can lead to lax verification which can ultimately lead to catastrophic failures as seen in the 787. This calls for strong oversight (e.g. management, good luck with that) and some significant targeted prototyping. As with any tool, recognizing its limitations is essential to a successful application.

"One test is worth a thousand expert opinions."

Re:No specs?

[DerekLyons]

I think your confusing a couple things here. CAD and simulation packages don't alleviate the need to build a "prototype" before mass production manufacturing.

Yet it has been done, successfully, multiple times in the recent past.
 

But you had better bet they build small pieces to validate their simulation models, or test particularly difficult portions of the design.

Sure, but that's not full prototyping as discussed by the OP, in fact it's utterly irrelevant.
 

That is why in "small" production runs like the navy does for subs, the first couple are always bastard children and nearly always end up getting retired early. They tweak small things and by the 2nd or 3rd model it preforms better, and then they build a dozen or so units which are basically identical.

Um... no. That's not even remotely true.
 

So, yes, computers have changed the dynamics of designing/building something, but the general trend may be described more like, delayed full scale prototyping rather than none at all.

Um, no. Like the OP, you're either stuck somewhere in last century, or you're completely and utterly clueless as to what you're talking about.

Re:No specs?

[DerekLyons]

This calls for strong oversight (e.g. management, good luck with that)

*sigh* Yet somehow, it's been done successfully and recently with very complex projects - a fact that everyone replying to me has done their level best to ignore or handwave away.
 
  You may be an engineer, but with statements like the on quoted above, you've decided to let bias and bromides substitute for facts.

Re:No specs?

[RocketRabbit]

"Here in the 21st century computers have advanced to the point where we don't need to physically prototype things anymore - it can, and has been, done digitally for well over a decade now."

Heh. While digital design has been around for quite some time now, there are ALWAYS test runs of a new processor. At this time, a new CPU is typically tested and manufacturing tweaked for maybe a WHOLE YEAR before it comes to market.

Re:No specs?

[vakuona]

You are comparing a mass produced product like an aeroplane with a submarine that is pretty much built "money no object". Computer simulation has not yet advanced to the point where you could trust it completely. If it was that easy, no formula 1 team would need a wind tunnel. And the FAA would not require test flights before letting a plane be flown commercially. The computer said everything will work right.

There is no substitute for a prototype. Not yet anyway. And certainly not for anything more complex than a toaster.

And you can't claim on the one hand that the lack of prototyping was a problem, then also claim that they extended the outsourcing thing too far. Unless the issue was that parts were not built to the correct specification, then it doesn't matter how you organise the outsourcing if your design is completely perfect. If everything is made to within the manufacturing tolerance, and the computer says it will fit together, then they should be no problem right?

Re:No specs?

[FlyingGuy]

Hey Derek your an ASSHOLE, mmmmm-K ?

You have obviously never been on a submarine under construction. Guess what, I have, SSN-692, and that was quite a few hulls later after the SSN-688 ( the first of the class ) was first built. The mini-grinder is the tool that every mechanic takes with them. Piping gets pulled into place with a chain fall so it can be welded in, hammers are used to bend shit into the right shape. let me tell you, General Dynamics has ALL the cool toys for this shit.

You want to talk modern? The latest combat ships are built up module by module and let me tell you those designers have the coolest toys and yet they still need big mofo's with big hammers to get things to line up and still still does not fit like it should.

You have a really fucked up attitude for someone with such a low id number. The person you replied to had valid points and you come off like some shitbird who does not have a fucking clue.

Re:No specs?

[ShoulderOfOrion]

An example of the reality that even the best design is nothing but paper (or bits) until it comes out the other end of the shop floor. That's why MIL-TFP40 is the most-requested but least-followed standard in industry.

(BTW, stands for 'Make It Like The F*ng Print For Once')

Re:No specs?

[Eunuchswear]

You have a really fucked up attitude for someone with such a low id number. The person you replied to had valid points and you come off like some shitbird who does not have a fucking clue.

And you come across as?

A guy who knows how to type <b>.

Re:No specs?

[Eunuchswear]

In Appliances, we prototyped, had test samples of new parts build from the production molds, built models for test and test the bejesus out of them. THEN we had two test production runs, tested the heck out of samples of THOSE, then released for production.

Splendid. Now do that with a 787.

(Rushes off to buy stock in Airbus...)

Re:No specs?

[Eunuchswear]

Now multiply that by one zillion subcontractors all operating more or less without adult oversight

And those "adults" would be who? Some white guys, you know, the ones who started the whole clusterfuck?

Re:No specs?

[mgcarley]

Mahindra, huh? Prepare for many headlines reading something to the effect of "Another plane crash in India".

Seriously, I'd rather fly on a large paper dart than anything built by Mahindra.

first post

[ProzakLord]

Yeah baby!!

Generic modularity is a good approach.

[pecosdave]

I suspect that with the mindset of a government contractor they told a bunch of different places sort of what they wanted, but not where it had to be or what it was going to plug into. Measurements, plugs, protocol standards, bolt holes, shape - they all matter - and "on a plane" doesn't answer most of the questions.

Re:Generic modularity is a good approach.

[MadKeithV]

I suspect that with the mindset of a government contractor they told a bunch of different places sort of what they wanted, but not where it had to be or what it was going to plug into. Measurements, plugs, protocol standards, bolt holes, shape - they all matter - and "on a plane" doesn't answer most of the questions.

Yes - everything matters - for a completely new system more than you will ever get right on paper without actually putting the whole thing together in the first place. Like the article says: many of the problems you will encounter during development are impossible to anticipate.

Interesting problem

[astralagos]

Systems design in engineering basically involves drawing a box around a bunch of parts and saying "this is a system". The interfaces after that are hopefulyl clean -- good systems design does that, but implicit in the choice of a system breakdown is efficiency loss. I might not, for example, think about the fact that the giant engine at the heart of my car could also run heating. There's this long term conflict in engineering between the need to abstract, which enables all forms of delegation, including outsourcing, subcontracting and even building teams, and the loss of efficiency. Good engineers learn things at an almost inexpressible level,developing jargons for the systems under their purview -- in the case of Boeing, there was literally one guy who was their expert on cabling. If you wanted to submit a drawing change, he could envision the change in the cabling of the plane and whether the change was physically possible. That's always been the bane of system abstraction - you find these things that have to cross systems and, if you don't recognize them early enough, they come back to bite you in all sorts of creative ways. Kelly Johnson was a big believer in this. His rules for skunkworks explicitly required that engineers had to be within a specific number of feet of the shop floor -- that way they weren't too divorced from the reality of the products they were making. You see this in the design of a lot of the early computer systems as well, parts bolted together in weird ways before we started developing this high-level view of what systems actually made up a computer.

Re:Interesting problem

[fermion]

Exactly what I was thinking. The issue is not modularity, but not defining interfaces. Modularity is nothing new, and I don't think there is anything wrong with the approach. The overall system, however, has to be defined. I can't imagine that Boeing did not do this. I suspect the pieces that did not fit together was mostly an issue of quality control and cost. For instance, I recently bought a long micro USB cable. The specs for the interface, the microB USB connector are well documented and any competent manufacturer should be able to make this product. However, the connector is not made properly and therefore does not work. Do I blame the people who make the USB standard? No, I blame shoddy workmanship and my desire to buy the cheapest cable possible.

Re:Interesting problem

[rndmtim]

Their modularity was set up to fail. I actually worked on a project for Boeing two years ago that was not Dreamliner related - ITAR protected so all I can vaguely say is it was a novel motor design for a crucial component that my former research adviser at RPI was the lead on. We were backfitting our new design into an existing motor compartment. As we got past the basic design, they then wanted an actual prototype to fit in a specific cavity, with some very specific power, speed, heat dissipation requirements and so on. We needed to match things like the mating spline, and we also needed our motor to lock into the existing space perfectly. Boeing did not own the original design, did not have access to the actual dimensions of the original motor - and the vendor in question didn't want to give the dimensions and was largely successful at saying no on this because it was their IP. Now granted we were academics working on something non-critical to their immediate success, but that tells you how far this process has gone for them in the wrong direction...

This is what happens with subcontracting

[Joe_Dragon]

This is what happens with subcontracting you give up to much control and people in the contracting line cut corners where they can.

C'mon, losers, we solved this in the 70's!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Obviously, Boeing should simply have specified that all the contractors deliver components that accept and output plaintext, and then used pipes and awk to cobble the pieces together into a working system! What could possibly go wrong?

Re:C'mon, losers, we solved this in the 70's!

[spiffmastercow]

Obviously, Boeing should simply have specified that all the contractors deliver components that accept and output plaintext, and then used pipes and awk to cobble the pieces together into a working system! What could possibly go wrong?

Battery fire.

Nah, just add a battery fire error message. We've been doing that with printers for decades.

Re:C'mon, losers, we solved this in the 70's!

[SirGarlon]

And all the software on the subcomponents must be written in Ada. ;-)

Re:C'mon, losers, we solved this in the 70's!

[Savage-Rabbit]

Obviously, Boeing should simply have specified that all the contractors deliver components that accept and output plaintext, and then used pipes and awk to cobble the pieces together into a working system! What could possibly go wrong?

As long as they did the scripting in VI... nothing. Emacs on the other hand?? Phew!... don't get me started.

Re:C'mon, losers, we solved this in the 70's!

[bsdewhurst]

The problem was the guy hired to write the awk scripts decided to use perl instead and half way through his cat rolled on the keyboard and he couldn't tell which parts were written by him and which by the cat so he left it all in. The battery controller must be using the cat code.

This is what happens...

[EmagGeek]

... when you are a big top secret defense contractor and you attempt to unify your development processes across all of your business units to "save money" through homogenization.

You can design something as an "interconnected series of black boxes" when it's something simple like a missile.

A 787 and other development abortions like the F22 and F35 are infinitely more complex than a simple war munition, and cannot be properly designed as an "interconnected series of black boxes."

Re:This is what happens...

[Wilf_Brim]

This. If you get the the bottom of TFA you see what really was driving the decisions about how to design and produce the 787. At the time of the critical decisions for the 787 the head honchos at Boeing were not really Boeing people (a corporation where the key competency for the last 60 years has been the production of profitable commercial airliners.) They came from McDonnell-Douglas, whose key competency was more in the production of military aircraft. The development process of current military hardware is intolerably broken. The old method of subcontracting the design of subsystems and then trying to get them to work together, then just getting more money from Uncle Sam when the result didn't work now results in the aforementioned F22 and F35 (the latter of which may never enter volume production, or at least some variants may not) because complexities have expanded, and costs have likewise increased exponentially. As it turns out, you can't do that with civilian airliners. There aren't friendly Senators and Representatives (whom you have paid off with campaign contributions and subcontractors in their district) to give you more money. And friendly Generals and Admirals (whom are expecting 6 and 7 figure jobs when they retire) who will accept your explanations why things aren't working correctly, and why it's going to be another 3 years to get their gizmo, which doesn't work quite as anticipated. You have shareholders who expect profit, airlines who expect a product in line with what they ordered and expect to pay, and regulators who do not take kindly to aircraft whose electronics bays burst into flames at odd times.

Hmm...question?

[Shoten]

By "hindered development," do they mean "made it harder?" If so...fucking duh. That's what happens when you try a new approach to building something...but that's not necessarily a reason not to innovate, and the fact that mistakes were made isn't necessarily an indictment of the activities that took place in the course of that innovation.

Coming up with a new way of building a large commercial airliner is not going to be easy, and you're going to make mistakes. The article seems a little light on details; I don't buy the notion that Boeing simply told their subcontractors, without any details whatsoever, to build components. I would wager that the real truth is that the subcontractors were given specifications with regard to specific points of integration, but that Boeing underestimated the potential to stay within those specs and still deliver a component that was incompatible with the surrounding area of the aircraft. Whoops, mistake...but you make mistakes when you innovate, and then you learn and move forward. This article seems to imply that Boeing has no idea how to build aircraft at all, and that's just not true.

Engineering

[the eric conspiracy]

Boeing didn't want to hire all the engineers needed to design the 787. So when they outsourced these subsystems they also counted on their suppliers to do the engineering of these subsystems.

The problem is that engineers are not fungible. Boeing didn't appreciate this, any more than the software industry did when it started outsourcing.

An aerospace structural frame engineer is not the same thing as a marine structure engineer. There are huge differences in the body of experience despite the fact that they both use the same tools.

This was the primary cause of the delays Boeing had. It will continue to be a problem for anyone who tries this sort of outsourcing.

Re:Engineering

[tibit]

The batteries are small. They should have simply swapped them out for a tad heavier and larger Ni-MH units. They went to unproven technology for savings of tens of kilograms and tens of liters of volume over the whole plane. They are stupid. That's all. There's a point where the savings are too small to risk a whole new battery tech. It's not an all-electric plane where it'd be a big deal. Those batteries are relatively small, relatively light, and don't need such a level of optimization and risk taking.

Re:Engineering

[vlm]

Why? Assuming its a technical thing rather than a bunch of economic handwaving.

LiFe is deployed in general aviation and aviation grade batts are COTS from the usual aerospace suspects. I read up on that battery system yesterday, apparently that specific chemistry is pretty tough and something about a ceramic cell separator

Re:Engineering

[LunaticTippy]

This is a good point. Apparently the plane has about 4.4 kWh of battery weighing 57kg. I could build a pack out of off-the-shelf gell cells weighing 133kg. It'd take 54 of the standard 12v 7Ah ones.

Re:Engineering

[deadweight]

Actually the choices for airplanes are: Wet lead-acid (what I bought last time because it's cheap) AGM lead-acid. (similar to gels, but much more voltage tolerant) NiCads (hate them - thermal runaway issues of their own, but at least you can turn them off and they quit)

Re:Engineering

[tibit]

NiMH and NiCad are similar enough, I presume?

Re:Engineering

[tibit]

IOW: they went lunatic over a 80kg of weight savings. Give me a fucking break. Someone at Boeing should get a beating with a cluebat.

Re:Engineering

[Carnildo]

IOW: they went lunatic over a 80kg of weight savings. Give me a fucking break. Someone at Boeing should get a beating with a cluebat.

Extra weight is expensive when you're flying. That 80kg of weight saving translates into around a half-million dollars of reduced lifetime operational costs per airplane.

Re:Engineering

[tibit]

So does a couple of passengers lowering their chips and beer intake by a tiny bit. It's not something you can measure, and point at some account in airline X, and say: here's the money we lost.

Re:Engineering

[Eunuchswear]

NiMH and NiCad are similar enough, I presume?

Why doi you assume that? Because the first two letters are the same?

Re:Engineering

[tibit]

At least from the charging perspective they seem to be compatible. I think it's in the durability department where they most differ.

Re:Engineering

[LunaticTippy]

Yes, when you're flying. These planes are not flying because they keep catching on fire.

If they want to save weight on a fleet of planes that are grounded because they aren't safe, it would save a lot more weight to use styrofoam instead of metal and silly string instead of wires. I bet they could save a lot more than 80kg!

Crowd-sourced design?

[gstoddart]

Wow, they crowd-sourced the design of a wide body aircraft?

So it's their reputation on the line, and likely a lot of the legal liability .. but they gave the suppliers reign to design their own parts?

That sounds like an epic fail in engineering to me. The 777 was a marvel in that every part had been designed and modeled in a computer before they ever built anything -- this sounds like a hodge-podge of parts.

At around $200 million a pop or so, that sounds awfully risky.

So it was outsourcing

[gr8_phk]

It wasn't outsourcing the production, it was outsourcing the design that was the problem. Particularly outsourcing the design of subsystems to different suppliers. You don't know if the pieces will work together until they come back home. It's not like an engineer at supplier 1 can walk down the hall and talk to a guy working on a part at supplier 2, but this does happen when you're all under one roof.

Re:So it was outsourcing

[tibit]

It's the 21st century. It's not like Skype is a new thing, you know. It's a management fiasco. Boeing managers should have made sure that those engineers from various suppliers do in fact talk to each other, and talk often.

Re:So it was outsourcing

[ceoyoyo]

That was an awfully long summary to say "it was outsourcing." But the submitter obviously likes to hear himself talk so he gave it a different name.

Re:So it was outsourcing

[vlm]

Boeing managers should have made sure that those engineers from various suppliers do in fact talk to each other, and talk often.

If they put resources toward general contractor-type work that eliminates the whole purpose of outsourcing / eliminating the general contractor work. "We'll pay you guys to do it, but since you won't, we'll do it too, to save money"

Operating in direct opposition to the bosses new management style is probably career limiting.

Re:So it was outsourcing

[DCheesi]

Great in theory, but in practice it's just not the same. Even if the different contractors are introduced to one another, they're still not really familiar with each other, nor do they necessarily view each other as being on the same team. Collaborations like this just work way better when everyone is working under the same hierarchy and getting their personal paychecks from the same place.

Re:So it was outsourcing

[tibit]

This may well be, but it's a starting state. People can learn to work around it -- when properly guided. That's where the management comes in.

Re:So it was outsourcing

[DarkOx]

Boeing managers should have made sure that those engineers from various suppliers do in fact talk to each other, and talk often.

Right in the era of NDAs and intellectual property being regarded as our chief output, that is probably impossible.

Re:So it was outsourcing

[MiG82au]

+1 I was about to just leave tibit's post alone because it's late, but you've mostly covered it. Politics and the lack of being able to walk up to someone with a pencil and paper is a PITA. I've worked at a subcontractor that does structural analysis for Airbus, and I've also gone to Korea as a technical liaison, and I must say it's just a wee bit more complicated than tibit makes it out to be.

First composite airplane?

[leandrod]

Was not a Beech ðe first composite airplane?

Re:First composite airplane?

[ceoyoyo]

I doubt it. Wasn't the Wright flyer made of wood and fabric?

Re:First composite airplane?

[deadweight]

Windeker Eagle in the late 60s was fiberglass. The WW II Mosquito was laminated wood.

*knock on wood*

[mcmonkey]

From the BBC story:

"I think people had their fingers crossed that it was a battery fault... it looks more systemic and serious to me. I suspect it could be difficult to identify the cause," [Keith Hayward, head of research at the Royal Aeronautical Society] said.

I would hope the folks in change of designing and building aircraft would depend on measurements and calculations, not crossed fingers. Did they also consult a Ouija board?

Re:*knock on wood*

[vakuona]

I think the article (and the person talking) meant that they hoped it was a battery problem because they would then have isolated the problem to a single component, which is much easier to fix.

If the problem is systemic, then it can be orders of magnitude harder to fix. For example, is it because the components, whilst each individually OK, behave in strange ways when combined in a certain way. Is the issue an emergent property of the whole system or only of part of the system? And which part. Is the part that appears to fail the actjal part that fails, or has something else failed (and affected another part badly)?

A completely made up example would be that a voltage regulator fails, and there is a voltage spike somewhere causing another part to melt. How do you know what caused that part to melt, particularly if you weren't monitoring the voltage. (Obviously stupid example.)

First composite airplane? No...

[Kevin Burtch]

Burt Rutan's beautiful creation holds that title.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Starship

Re:First composite airplane? No...

[iAlex]

Um, try again. One of the first composite aircraft was the Bolkow Phoebus sailplane designed in the 50's. It was built with a balsa core and glass fiber. Carbon fiber sailplanes began to be produced starting in the mid 70's.

Re:First composite airplane? No...

[Kevin Burtch]

Um, try again. One of the first composite aircraft was the Bolkow Phoebus sailplane designed in the 50's. It was built with a balsa core and glass fiber. Carbon fiber sailplanes began to be produced starting in the mid 70's.

" Carbon fiber composite was used to varying degrees on military aircraft, but at the time the Starship was certified, no civilian aircraft certified by the US Federal Aviation Administration had ever used it so extensively."

Also, I'm talking airplanes, not gliders.

Re:First composite airplane? No...

[deadweight]

Gliders ARE airplanes and carbon-fiber/epoxy is not the only composite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windecker_Eagle Prior art LOL

Re:First composite airplane? No...

[ceoyoyo]

Gliders are airplanes. Perhaps you meant powered airplanes.

Yes, if you look you can find a crappy dictionary that includes jets and/or propellors in the definition, but the good dictionaries define it properly.

Also, your own quote suggests that "first composite airplane" is entirely a subjective title based on how much composite you consider to be enough. And carbon fibre composite at that.

Re:Lithium batteries considered dangerous

[SternisheFan]

Elon Musk of Tesla Motors agrees with the un-safeness of these batteries.

..." Musk, who has run Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] for several years, laid out his thoughts on battery design in a detailed e-mail to the website Flightglobal.

In it, he termed the architecture of the GS Yuasa battery packs supplied to Boeing "inherent unsafe," and predicted more fires from the same causes due to its design.

Specifically, Musk criticized the use of large-format lithium-ion cells "without enough space between them to isolate against the cell-to-cell thermal domino effect."

He also noted that when thermal runaway occurs in the larger cells, more energy is released by the single cell than comes from a small-format "commodity" cell, of the type used by the thousands in Tesla battery packs.

And he went on to highlight what he viewed as the dangers of batteries using those large-format cells, saying they have a "fundamental safety issue" because it's harder to keep the internal temperature of a large-format cell consistent from the center to the edges.

Not surprisingly, Mike Sinnett--Boeing's chief engineer for the 787 project--counters that the company designed the pack to cope with not only a single cell failure but to contain runaway thermal events as well."

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1082007_tesla-ceo-musk-boeing-787-batteries-inherently-unsafe

outsource that

[pesho]

It's easy to blame the outsourcing.

Ok so if it wasn't outsourcing what was the problem?

But, in this instance, it wasn't so much the outsourcing, as it was the decision to modularize a complicated problem too soon.'

Oh, so it was outsourcing, they were just trying to outsource as early as possible so they won't have to pay engineers to develop the specs.

Boeing

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a short article on the Dreamliner in the latest New Yorker magazine REQUIEM FOR A DREAMLINER? . Quote Surowiecki :The Dreamliner was supposed to become famous for its revolutionary design. Instead, it’s become an object lesson in how not to build an airplane.
To understand why, you need to go back to 1997, when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. Technically, Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas. But, as Richard Aboulafia, a noted industry analyst with the Teal Group, told me, “McDonnell Douglas in effect acquired Boeing with Boeing’s money.” McDonnell Douglas executives became key players in the new company, and the McDonnell Douglas culture, averse to risk and obsessed with cost-cutting, weakened Boeing’s historical commitment to making big investments in new products. Aboulafia says, “After the merger, there was a real battle over the future of the company, between the engineers and the finance and sales guys.” The nerds may have been running the show in Silicon Valley, but at Boeing they were increasingly marginalized by the bean counters.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/02/04/130204ta_talk_surowiecki#ixzz2JTGx7SPc

Re:Boeing

[fnj]

MBAs are like politicians. When they need to be bitch slapped and put away, they end up untouchable. But you can't effectively run a country like that, and you certainly can't run an aircraft building company like that - except run it INTO THE GROUND in both cases.

Re:Boeing

[quacking duck]

On the surface, that sounds a lot like the Apple purchase of NeXT the year earlier, in that NeXT staff soon ended up in all the key positions. Unlike Apple/NeXT, though, Boeing/MD did the complete opposite on the critical points the requiem article touched on.

Re:Boeing

[Eunuchswear]

MBAs are like politicians. .

No. Politicians are competent and useful (when compared to MBA's).

ObAlexander

[michaelmalak]

Post-web people may like to read what was all the rage in the early 1990's: the deep philosophy of software development. Doug Lea has a concise summary, so you don't have to read several hundred pages. And here's a quick direct quote from Christopher Alexander I just now Googled:

...it is not possible to make something beautiful, merely by combining fixed components.

Re:ObAlexander

[WillAdams]

One advantage of object-oriented programming on computer systems is that the components are _not_ fixed in terms of how the user perceives them --- behaviours and appearance can easily be modified (see ``pose as'' in Objective-C), keeping the development advantages and maintainability and robustness of discrete components, but allowing customization to a level not possible in the physical world.

NeXTstep was built out of a combination of a number of software components, and if any operating system deserves the appellation ``beautiful'', it would.

For physical components, I can see your point, but I still believe that w/ reasonable engineering controls and better management, and earlier testing the Dreamliner integration could've been more successful and less expensive.

William

Re:Lithium batteries considered dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

Elon Musk of Tesla Motors who has offered to sell batteries to Boeing agrees with the un-safeness of these competitors batteries.

..." Musk, who has run Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] for several years, laid out his thoughts on his company's battery design is better in a detailed marketing e-mail to the website Flightglobal.

There you go, a bit of clarification for you.

Read reason Boeing built it in pieces...

[blahbooboo]

Boeing built it in pieces because they had to be able to sell the plane to foreign countries. It's a tremendous sales aid being able to point to parts of the plane being built by the country interested in purchasing the plane. This is why it's a mess of a build.

Re:Read reason Boeing built it in pieces...

[Richard_at_work]

Almost 40% of a Boeing 777 by weight is foreign sourced (not including engines) so they didn't have to build it n pieces to include foreign suppliers - aside from that, the point of the article is that Boeing also gave the job of detailed design definition to the outsourced suppliers, and that is where the issue comes in.

Aircraft have been built in pieces for decades before the 787, for example all Airbus aircraft since the A320 in the mid 1980s have been built as prefabricated sections and joined on the FAL in exactly the same way as that intended for the 787. Airbus have only had one major issue with this approach, the software issues in CATIA version mismatches that caused the A380 fuck up - it worked perfectly for every aircraft before.

Re:Read reason Boeing built it in pieces...

[geekoid]

" Airbus have only had one major issue with this approach"
What? no, not true at all.
Bad Cockpit design,. bad wiring, premature stress cracks in the wings.

" it worked perfectly for every aircraft before.
all airplane have items that " worked perfectly for every aircraft before." right up until it crashes. It's a nonsense statement.. at BEST it shows a company not testing old systems on new air craft.

Re:Read reason Boeing built it in pieces...

[Richard_at_work]

"Bad cockpit design" - no worse than any other. Care to elaborate?

"Bad wiring" - again, care to elaborate? If you mean the A380 debacle, did you miss the part of my point where I explicitly mentioned that as the only major issue they had with their approach?

"Premature stress cracks in the wings" - using a new production process in an Airbus factory, which would have occurred if Airbus produced the wings 100 yards from the FAL anyway. Hardly a great argument against my point.

The design and build process Airbus has used for the past 30 years is the design and build process Boeing is trying to achieve with the 787 - Airbus has nearly 7,000 aircraft delivered under that very design and build process, and yet has never had a major fleet grounding ordered by the FAA or EASA. They must be doing something right...

Re:Lithium batteries considered dangerous

[vlm]

TLDR scalability issue due to cubed vs square law scaling.

High temperature can blow up some Li cells. The total thermal energy scales with volume, but the surface heat can escape from scales with surface area. So its hard (although not impossible) for one cell in a laptop to blow up the adjacent cells. But if you make the individual cells big enough you can get a chain reaction going.

This is a meta issue anyway. There are battery techs not susceptible to chain reactions, and not susceptible to occasionally blowing up an individual cell anyway.

Lets say you decide to make mousepads out of fissionable plutonium. Boss reports that they're getting bad PR because of mfgr variations or mishandling sometimes the plutonium mousepad blows up, although you tried to design it for a very unfavorable geometry. Well you can argue geometry and mfgr tolerances all day, but the mistake was making the mousepad out of plutonium, not making it "wrong".

Re:Lithium batteries considered dangerous

[tibit]

Well, demonstrably it didn't contain much because there was smoke on board. Containment means the battery dies, and outside, apart from lost functionality, nothing bad happens. Smoke is kind of a no-no.

Training

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a systems engineer,

Off-topic - what's your education and training?

Other interesting Boeing paper

[advid.net]

In this artcle they cite a 2001 Boeing paper which I find very interesting.

All those MBA bosses should have a look, it seems very few have learned any lesson since then.

The point is made that not only is the work out-sourced; all the profits associated with the work are out-sourced, too.
...
A strong warning is included about the perils of sub-optimum solutions in which individual cost are minimized in isolation.

It is quite enlightening, given that their problem today could very likely come from those interdepartmental interactions not thoroughly planned enough.

More common than you think...

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

I have news for you. This is how most things are developed.

Homes are built from standardized components, as are production machines, cars, computers and even software. Often, we pick our components first, with only a hazy idea of the finished product. We think we know what we are developing, but after its built, it usually looks quite different than first imagined.

The key is Boeing is developing a much more difficult design and this is their first attempt at using this method. It is understandable that things didn't work perfectly, just like the first time we used CAD systems - something we have come to depend on.

Aircraft today is far more complex then before, and its getting more complex. I can see why Boeing is attempting to spread the workload across a virtual company, rather than attempt to do it completely in-house.

Re:More common than you think...

[gbjbaanb]

true, homes are built from standardised components but you'll find those components are very well defined and fit together well enough to work. That was the problem with this - the pieces were not well defined enough to fit together well.

Of course a brick is less complicated than an aircraft component, but even then you know exactly what you want to build, and you work out how its going to be put together and then you build it. No-one thinks "I'll build a house, I'll need, umm, some bricks and some wood" and then gets started. they get an architect to draw up some plans and that'll tell you exactly how many bricks and what size and shape wood you need.

Bad drawings are the rule not the exception

[sjbe]

When it comes to mechanical parts, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing is a solved problem. When it comes to electrical interoperability, one'd think that's a solved problem as well.

"Solved problem"? HAAHAHAHHHAAHHAAAAA....

You don't manufacture things for a living do you? I run a company that makes wire harnesses. We're a contract manufacturer - we don't design things, we just take prints and build what is on the prints. I can count on my fingers on one hand the number of prints we have gotten from customers which were correct and sufficiently detailed such that the product could be built without asking any questions. There pretty much always are critical details left out of the prints. About 2/3 of the prints we see have incompatible parts specified. About half are missing at least one important dimension such as length. About 10% have missing parts and about 25% have incompatible parts. About 20% specify needlessly expensive parts like gold plated terminals that cost more but provide no actual performance benefit. Most of them leave off at least one critical tolerance. I've even seen drawings with dimension in inches and tolerances in metric.

Why does this happen? For the most part because an alarming number of engineers doing the drawings aren't actually very good at their job. Some of them are just plain lazy. The electrical engineers usually can specify a wire schematic but often have no idea whether something can actually be built or know much about industry standards. The more mechanical engineers (yes mechanical engineers can and do design circuits) tend to create bad designs and specify the wrong parts because they don't know any better. Sometimes they are trying to do a good job but they don't bother to consult manufacturing during the design process and they come up with a stupid design or something that is impossible to build.

I have run into some good engineers but they are the exception.

Re:Bad drawings are the rule not the exception

[reub2000]

One would hope that when designing a $200M machine with the lives of 240 depending on it working properly, that you would hire the exceptions.

Re:Bad drawings are the rule not the exception

[tibit]

I do manufacture things, and it took me 10 years to figure out how to spec things out so that the techs make exactly what I want. The technical problem is solved. The human problem maybe isn't. Human is in having competent engineers. I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to.

Re:Bad drawings are the rule not the exception

[k6mfw]

About 2/3 of the prints we see have incompatible parts specified. About half are missing at least one important dimension such as length.

Wow, I thought I was the only one observing this... and people complain to me about being too nit-picky about details.

Re:Bad drawings are the rule not the exception

[dcollins]

"I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to."

"I assume that big companies are hyper-competent" is one of this country's most pervasive and dangerous delusions. The opposite is most often the case; especially when a company has a near-monopoly position and powerful political friends, then doing a good job is not necessary.

Re:Bad drawings are the rule not the exception

[hazem]

One would hope... that you would hire the exceptions.

The problem is that most people have been promoted to the level of their incompetence (Peter Principle) yet most people believe they ARE the exceptions (Dunning Kruger Effect).

This problem pervades society and is not limited to Boeing. But it could be related to process. Some companies have the mentality of "hire the very best, so why worry about process" Others (like LEAN organizations) go the other direction: assume we have average employees, so design the most reliable processes possible.

Frankly, given the complexity of what they're trying to do, I'm surprised they're as successful as they are.

Re:Bad drawings are the rule not the exception

[tibit]

"I assume that big companies are hyper-competent" is one of this country's most pervasive and dangerous delusions.

And that's a rather scary thought, but I seems one can't but agree :(

Re:Bad drawings are the rule not the exception

[painandgreed]

I have run into some good engineers but they are the exception.

I would have to say that half of all the engineers I have ever met are below average.

Top down vs Bottom up

[EmperorOfCanada]

Obviously a large project has to have an overarching design and direction but a great example of a failed top down aviation design would be the Space Shuttle. They designed many of the larger systems in oddly specific waves of a wand and then left it to engineers to actually invent them. A really great example of this failure were the cryopumps for the liquid hydrogen and oxygen. This things had to pump a swimming pool of fuel every few seconds and were beyond anything anyone had done before. Yet they had to fit into a specific space and last 25 flights or more. But what happened was that they pumps could not be built to last more than a flight or two and thus became part of the servicing between every flight. The problem was that they were buried deep inside the engines and were a royal pain to replace. This plus a zillion other similar high level decisions resulted in each shuttle flight turnaround taking forever an costing way too much.

So if you look at the Space X people they are doing the opposite and seeing how good an engine they can build and then plopping a spaceship on top of that. This is how functional companies that don't have too much MBA management bloat engineer things. But my guess is that instead of Boeing just designing a better airplane with composites and seeing what interesting things could be done they made a long series of "executive" decisions and then told outsourced engineering teams to make square pegs fit into round holes. This would be as opposed to a healthy back and fourth where a high level goal is set, the rubber meets the road engineers give their feed back that changes the high level design which results in more feedback until you have a solid high level design that the engineers are fairly certain they can design.

I suspect nearly every programmer here has had a taste of this when some MBA type demands a costly feature that when all is said and done will be used by one person to very little benefit; all because there was no real feedback mechanism to say "whoa there dumb feature."

That's WHY outsourcing

[geekoid]

is the problem. Well, you save a few pennies in development Boeing, hows that working out for you?

Re:That's WHY outsourcing

[Virtucon]

Stop.. In manufacturing there's a lot of integration, third party suppliers or outsourcing as it can also be called. All of those have various degrees of risk associated with them. When you're talking about the scale of what Boeing did on the 787, I think it created new management challenges that they weren't fully expecting and the result was cost overruns and schedule delays. They've always integrated and outsourced with partners. For example I know that they don't make their own nuts and bolts, or rivets or engines for their planes. These come, and have for many many decades, from suppliers who were given specifications and who worked with Boeing. Some of the components such as engines were developed in close partnership, meaning teams from engine manufacturer X at Boeing etc. It's been long since proven that doing it all yourself doesn't get you ahead, you do have more control ala Henry Ford and the River Rouge plant where he didn't have to rely on anybody, or that was his thinking anyway but that went out in the 40s when he couldn't keep up with his contracts for the US government. He even made his own steel. And it eventually became very cumbersome for Ford to maintain this. This was an industry lesson learned and it clearly demonstrated that no manufacturer can exist and create everything on their own and within each business there are associated risks and supply chains that have to be monitored, preserved and nurtured to make it all happen. Do suppliers fail? Yes, but that is one of the risks associated with modern manufacturing and it's up to your business management models to help manage that risk. Obviously in that case Boeing gets a "C-" for the 787 and with the current electrical system woes, they get an "I" for incomplete. They do get an "A" for effort in trying to build something new that hasn't been done before. If you read the stories from people and the press about how their experiences are on the 787, then you'll see what I'm talking about. LCD window shades, quiet cabins.. As somebody who flies, weekly, this is long overdue and it's innovative and yes, with all new innovations there are teething problems. As for the supply chain issues, they'll get settled and yes there may be a "labor" component involved here especially since there have been problems for them getting things manufactured here in the US. If you want a root cause for "outsourcing" look to the US government that in "some" cases goes way out of its way to make things hard for businesses and also creates nice big loopholes in legislation that allow H1-B visas to be used for "Kindergarten Teachers."

Re:That's WHY outsourcing

[Dr. Spork]

But all this outsourcing has a strong political component. You see, Boeing gets a lot of government money, even for their commercial operations. But the money only keeps coming from the feds if you get them something in return! They will vote to fund your plane, but only if they can bring pork back to their deserving district. So 100 congressmen can go home and say they are responsible for bringing high-paying jobs into their district. That's why Boeing parts are made in so many places. It makes no sense in terms of project management or engineering. It only makes sense politically.

The solution was not far from them...

[XB-70]

They should have hired Linus Torvalds to consult and used git for the master blueprint.

Premature modularization applies to many systems

[Doug Jensen]

The bottom line of this story is a mistake that is a peril to virtually all large complex systems -- in particular (of interest to this forum), software-based systems. I see this mistake made in large complex (are there any other kind?) military systems, especially distributed ones -- my primary field of professional expertise. The context for this mistake often is that the system integrator usually prematurely farms out system components to subcontractors in as many politically important states and subcontractors as possible. Moreover, there is a DoD bandwagon called Modular Open Systems Architecture, which (like capitalism, as we have seen all too clearly) can be misapplied and exaggerated. Wouldn't I just love to describe some (very expensive) real examples .... but I need my consulting clients and security clearance :)

Humans are not a solved problem

[sjbe]

I do manufacture things, and it took me 10 years to figure out how to spec things out so that the techs make exactly what I want.

We've told engineers exactly how to specify products such that they get what they want and most of them proceed to ignore us. For most products we make I can send you a well formatted spreadsheet and if you fill it out completely you'll get exactly the product you want from us. It really isn't all that complicated but does require a certain attention to detail which seems to be lacking.

The technical problem is solved. The human problem maybe isn't.

There is no maybe about it. The human component is not solved the problems are not separable. Humans design things and humans are the ones that make the bad drawings.

I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to.

We've built parts for aerospace companies. In my experience they are at most marginally better than engineers in other industries. I've actually worked at Boeing while in school and while they have some very smart people working their corporate work culture is not heavy on collaboration. (That's a nice way of saying they don't cooperate well with others)

Re:Humans are not a solved problem

[tibit]

We've told engineers exactly how to specify products such that they get what they want and most of them proceed to ignore us.

So, it is a human problem, as I've said. Maybe if people were sacked until, um, quality of their output improved, things would be better. I don't know how to fix people, admittedly, but - again - where is the management, training, etc.? Can't no one develop and improve their employees anymore?

The human component is not solved the problems are not separable.

I'd seem to agree, but it should be a separable problem. For all I know it may be limited to Boeing's corporate culture, or to large corporate U.S. culture. How is it elsewhere? We know there's a bunch of entitlement-feeling jackasses in the U.S., perhaps this permeates the workplace so as to negatively impact the engineering output. What about China? Japan? India? Germany? I'm serious, I'd like to know. Maybe U.S. engineering culture has rotted away in the last two decades?

Re:Humans are not a solved problem

[sjbe]

Maybe if people were sacked until, um, quality of their output improved, things would be better. I don't know how to fix people, admittedly, but - again - where is the management, training, etc.?

Hard to do since quality of drawings is poorly measured. If you can't/don't track it, it is hard to improve it. Trying to solve a problem by threatening termination is rarely a useful strategy. It's a bit like shooting your dog for peeing on the carpet. It does provide a sort of solution but not one you'll be very happy with for long.

How is it elsewhere?

Pretty much the same no matter where you go in my experience. In the last twelve months I've seen prints from Japan, China, Canada and the US. Same issues no matter where you go. A print I quoted from a Japanese auto maker with a good quality reputation a few months ago was missing most of the detail from the bill of materials (including part numbers), some of what was present was wrong or open to multiple interpretations. I just quoted a trailer maker for a body harness that included over $1000 of gold plated terminals that were completely unnecessary.

What about China? Japan? India? Germany? I'm serious, I'd like to know. Maybe U.S. engineering culture has rotted away in the last two decades?

The problem isn't specific in my experience to the US or any other country and I've dealt with engineers from around the globe. There are at least two problems (and probably more) at work, one of communication and one of verification. People tend to forget that they aren't doing the drawings for themselves, they are doing them for someone else. As a result they forget that certain bits of information that they take for granted are often not obvious to others. I'm both an engineer and an accountant and the same problem exists in accounting. Work processes have to be described in rather a lot of detail and many people (including engineers) really aren't very good at this. Even when they are good at it, time and budget constraints often come into play. These problems are magnified if with distance and/or language barriers between the two parties. Worse it is hard to know what you might have left out of a document so verification comes into play but often this step is not handled adequately.

Agile aerospace development

[CptNerd]

Maybe they should have had more daily scrums in their agile development process...

Its because ...

[PPH]

... Boeing laid off and retired the people that understood how the pieces fit together. Modular development works fine if you have people that understand systems at a high level and you keep the lines of communication between systems integration (Boeing) and suppliers short.

Pack the batteries in sugar

[Dareth]

Pack the batteries in sugar, that way when they burn you get pretty colors and nice caramel smell.

Re:It Wasn't Outsourcing, But it Was

[Virtucon]

OMG what a bunch of BS. If you have a cellphone anywhere from 75% to 100% is manufacturing "outsourced" and in the case of design that can be anywhere from 0% to 100% as the design is outsourced as well. Look at all the products out there that are the same but sold under different brand names. We're not talking creamed corn here either. Unfortunately the modern world requires outsourcing, not to be confused with shipping jobs overseas because of cheap labor, that's another argument. It's well documented that Boeing met with resistance when it wanted to build a plant in a right to work state (remember strikes at Boeing shutting things down awhile back?) So they invest $750 million in a plant in South Carolina to transition work from Seattle to the new facility. The National Labor Relations Board, a group of political appointees brought suit against them doing it. Now, if Boeing completely "offshored" this plant in Taiwan let's say, what could the NLRB do? Not much but Boeing does a lot of business with the US government (defense contracting) but I bring this up as a prime case where government interference, read blatant union pandering, causes jobs to get shipped overseas. Unions have a place, fair and equitable job markets have a place and that's where the policy makers should be focused. Shit, recently American Airlines signed an agreement with Republic Airlines to fly some of their routes that are serviced by American Eagle. You see because of their labor agreements with pilots unions they were prohibited in flying aircraft with more than 50 seats on Eagle. Think about it, a regional carrier can't buy an Embraier 175 for example because it has too many seats because of a labor agreement and an example as to why organized labor in this country is failing, miserably. I've worked in Union shops, I've been a member of a Union and frankly, the Union's I worked for at the time were more interested in their dues and their bureaucracy than the workers they represented. You may have the right to bargain collectively, organize a union but that shouldn't handcuff how exactly a business delivers services to remain competitive. Otherwise these nice businesses go into Bankruptcy Court where a nice judge who's sympathetic about keeping the business going says "Sure, invalidated those nasty contracts." Then in the case of Hostess, American Airlines and any other company who has leveraged this the workers, the employees get screwed. There needs to be protection for workers rights, there needs to be collective bargaining but a business exists to make a profit and when the labor force becomes problematic in that enterprise, businesses either find a way to work it out, they offshore, they outsource or they go bankrupt.

Re:Lithium batteries considered dangerous

[Virtucon]

Didn't some Fiskers blow up with the flooding in Hurricane Sandy? So now you want to put these on an airplane as a critical part of the electrical system. Flawed thinking. Go back to a stable design and look for the 200lbs of weight savings elsewhere. Hire thinner flight attendants or don't fly fat people around.

Feynman Shuttle Report

[GODISNOWHERE]

This sounds uncomfortably similar to Feynman's criticism of the "top-down" method of constructing the Space Shuttle.

The Space Shuttle Main Engine was handled in a different manner, top down, we might say. The engine was designed and put together all at once with relatively little detailed preliminary study of the material and components. Then when troubles are found in the bearings, turbine blades, coolant pipes, etc., it is more expensive and difficult to discover the causes and make changes. For example, cracks have been found in the turbine blades of the high pressure oxygen turbopump. Are they caused by flaws in the material, the effect of the oxygen atmosphere on the properties of the material, the thermal stresses of startup or shutdown, the vibration and stresses of steady running, or mainly at some resonance at certain speeds, etc.? How long can we run from crack initiation to crack failure, and how does this depend on power level? Using the completed engine as a test bed to resolve such questions is extremely expensive. One does not wish to lose an entire engine in order to find out where and how failure occurs. Yet, an accurate knowledge of this information is essential to acquire a confidence in the engine reliability in use. Without detailed understanding, confidence can not be attained. A further disadvantage of the top-down method is that, if an understanding of a fault is obtained, a simple fix, such as a new shape for the turbine housing, may be impossible to implement without a redesign of the entire engine.

Full report is here http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html

"Things" that do "stuff".

[fahrbot-bot]

I think part of the problem is that Boeing defined what components they needed, but not necessarily completely how they were to be built or function internally (for things that have internals). For example, they may have specified an electronic component by its inputs/outputs and working/environmental tolerances, but not anything about the internals. In theory, this "black box" approach should work pretty well, but - as we programmers know - side effects, edge conditions and unknowns are a bitch.

In the case of the Li-Ion battery and its external monitoring/charging equipment, different assumptions may have been made on either side. As for other components, sometimes one needs to know how they're to be assembled to make them correctly.

Plutonium mouse pads vs Lithium-Ion Batteries

[Firethorn]

Where your analogy breaks down is that weight matters for a plane. Plutonium doesn't make for a superior mousepad, but lithium ion has the advantage of a wider operating temperature range(specifically colder), high efficiency, power capacity, and energy density.

IE a lithium ion battery is going to generally be at least half the weight of any other chemistry for the necessary power/energy demands of the application, and you don't need to worry as much about heating them. For a plane, this makes you really want to use them.

Sure, you might only be saving 100 pounds for the battery pack, less than the added weight an extra obese passenger, but a couple hundred pounds for the batteries, a few hundred from the landing gear, engines, galley, cockpit, seats, wings, flaps, electrical systems, pumps, etc... Next thing you know, your plane is 10-20% lighter and that translates into extra speed, lower fuel cost, etc...

Krugman called it two years ago

[Bananenrepublik]

I know I'm late for a nice flamefest, but I'm sure someone will point out how Krugman was wrong about this when he discussed it almost two years ago: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/thank-you-boeing/

wrong it's bad management...like the F-22

[globaljustin]

The problem here isn't lack of prototyping, it appears that they tried to extend the process too far and the management systems weren't weren't set up properly to handle the new process

No, the problem is bureaucracy. Bureaucratic systems inefficient at management, partially due to a misunderstanding of and over-reliance upon digital data.

in other words: BAD MANAGEMENT

You attempted to give examples of "(IIRC) three" unspecified aerospace projects that had been prototyped using all-digital, proving nothing. Assuming your examples are real, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Aerospace prototyping failures that result in commercial product failures are a big fucking deal.

Look, here's what you are missing: When human lives are involved, prototyping things like...um...the F-22 or this 787 with a real-life prototype is *absolutely necessary*

The only way to conclude otherwise is to de-value human life. Do all the actuarial MBA-bullshit spreadsheets you want, you are still doing less work, less science on a complex project purely to save money *at the expense of lives*

Research 'military boondoggles' and you'll see Boeing has experience with this. The F-22 Raptor, be it digital-only prototype or not, is an example of the same **FAILURE OF MANAGEMENT** in all ways.

I'm not just talking 'operational' failure. There is a systemic problem and a systemic inability to do proper error correction...so it's like having clogged pipes that are also rusting.

That's the problem here. A fundamental flaw that with certainty will result in using bad metrics in the lab when deciding the statistical tolerances for the prototyping program....that's just one mistake.

Re:wrong it's bad management...like the F-22

[DerekLyons]

Look, here's what you are missing

No, I'm not missing anything. The one missing something here is you - you have utterly no clue what you're talking about. Worse than that, you seem to believe that your utter ignorance can be disguised by using buzzwords and making absolute statements that have precisely zero basis in or connection with reality.

Re:wrong it's bad management...like the F-22

[Eunuchswear]

No, the problem is bureaucracy. Bureaucratic systems inefficient at management, partially due to a misunderstanding of and over-reliance upon digital data.

WTF does this even mean?

"Bureaucratic systems"? You mean Boeing is run by unelected people working in offices? How is this different from any other company?

"misunderstanding of digital data"?

The obvious question

[jafac]

Did they NOT have fires during the thousands of hours of test-flights?

deemed irrelevant

[globaljustin]

I'm calling troll....

I refuted your points, with specific examples using technical language (not 'buzzwords'). I gave the F-22 example. I used systems science and 'management science' terminology.

I offered a simple thesis...your approach is a cost-saving measure but ill-suited to situation like vehicles where human lives are at stake. I said your method sacrificed human lives for 'efficiency'.

That is a falsify-able statement you could have argued against...if you weren't a TROLL

Anyone reading this deep can judge but I deem thee a troll and you have rendered this part of the thread irrelevant.

Management (from the top - CEO, COO, CFO, Board)

[crazybabydoc]

Chair, President, CEO - BA, MBA (not a shred of actual engineering experience) President, CEO - BA, MBA (used to be a 727 mechanic . . . in the 70s) Senior VP - history major Senior VP - CIVIL engineering and a master's in engineering management . . . Dilbert says hello) CTO - BS/MA physics, PhD engineering I'm not arguing only aeronautical engineers could run an airplane manufacturer. That would be similar to saying only doctors should run hospitals/healthcare companies. BUT . . . if you accumulate too many 'profit' bean counters, an organization can often lose sight of the fact that it's the product that makes money not making money off the product. The only reason we get away with it in healthcare is because society pays us to do stuff . . . regardless of whether we do it well. "What's the difference between a doctor and a pilot?" A doctor isn't going to go down with you. -David Healy, MD Arguably the same could be said for senior management at most US corporations.