Posts by bazza

Re: Everybody throttles

They're written off so far as the customer is concerned. That's a fraudulent way to do business.

Re: Everybody throttles

The software may well be the thing that makes it look like the battery has only so much capacity, but it's also the thing that stops you driving the car... And you can't drive a car with an utterly inaccurate energy-remaining meter.

Re: Yet Another Needless Distraction

And at present, it looks like current stock holders are clinging to a vision of beauty that wasn't there, and increasingly being revealed to be something of a monster... That has all the hallmarks of a sudden stock price collapse in the making!

Re: Something something pun about Horizon

WRT the Post Office scandal, whilst Fujitsu's software wasn't the greatest, the largest part of the blame for the wrongful convictions lies with those too lazy to check the software's reporting, and presenting said data as "fact". In my view there were a number of failings. The Post Office didn't verify its evidence. The Courts did not force the Post Office to verify its evidence, repeatedly allowing convictions based on a single unverified source of evidence.

In my opinion, whilst Fujitsu is part of this chain of failure, the Courts' failure to understand or even inquire independently of the quality of the evidence being presented to them is the ultimate real problem. If courts are unable to determine sworn bullshit from sworn fact, you cannot have a fair trial.

The inquiry into this is still going on. However, part of the problem with the inquiry is that it is a former judge running it; one wonders how open he is to examining the role of the judiciary in admitting the evidence in the first place. Historically, when "science" has gone wrong in court cases, they're not exactly keen to examine why. There's repeatedly been miscarriages of justice due to "trusted experts" turning out to be bullshitters - the Post Office scandal, the role of Roy Meadows in the Munchausen-by-proxy baby deaths wrongful convictions. Years ago there was even a rape conviction that hinged solely on DNA evidence; the conviction was overturned, because the convicted man was wealthy enough to commission his own forensic test that showed that, yes, he was a close match but definitely not a perfect match; he won at appeal. That case resulted in a change in the standards required for DNA evidence. The point is, the initial standard that he successfully discredited had been set by "trusted experts", who turned out to have been bullshitting, and had resulted in wrongful convictions.

Chimerics

For DNA evidence, worse still, there's been proven cases of genetic chimerics in the US courts - a child care fraud case was overturned when it turned out a woman's reproductive organs really did have a different genetic make up to the rest of her body.

Science has no idea how common this trait is. There is very little data, so it is considered rare. But again, it's bullshitting; medical science has no evidence for how rare or common it is, and adopts the view "we've not seen it much, so it must be rare". However, you cannot really systematically measure the occurrence of this condition without detailed examination of a large number of corpses, cm cube by cm cube, which is not something that's really possible to do. So far as I know, no one has ever done a systematic study.

So, with every piece of DNA evidence - whether accusatory or exonerationary, there is doubt; we don't really know if there is a reliable read across from the DNA profile derived from, say, a mouth swab to the DNA profile of samples from other parts of the body. It's assumed to be reliable. Yet this doubt is not explained to courts, or investigators, and this too has (in the US) resulted in wrongful convictions that were very difficult to overturn.

In that particular case, it was overturned by means of having a court official witness the birth of the woman's second child, and a DNA analysis of that child and the mother to prove the genetic discrepancy. The Judge in the case ended up saying that he now had no idea whether he could ever trust DNA evidence ever again.

Re: They may call it a success...

None of this matters if they can't get a FOD-free launch.

Re: They may call it a success...

Yes, it is a problem. Generally I've seen it most commonly exhibited by what I call the "MatLabists", who think they can model anything.

The hilarious part is that such people often seem to think they can turn their model into a working system, with direct synthesis to an FPGA, or similar. I've never, ever seen that succeed in anything but extremely trivial ways. The worst part of it is that MatLab is a very bad way of implementing an entire system, so the MatLabists don't ever get to explore the entire system, and therefore tend to have a skewed view of how much of the system is composed of their part (generally, not much) and how much of it is other stuff (databases, networks, people, etc). Given that model to implementation synthesis only ever works on a very limited range of hardware, and that there's many, many other factors that go into hardware selection than "does it play nicely with MatLab?", they often totally fail to deliver anything at all useful. And they really, really do not like being told that their part is perhaps only 5% of the entire thing.

I generally budget for starting again from scratch.

Though I will say that I have seen some very good results using kit from Annapolis Microsystems, largely because they build pretty good hardware and their own tooling. They make it easy for their kit to be part of a functioning system.

The problem these days lies in organisations that don't have experienced engineers leading them. Such management gets all sorts of messages, and the Matlabists generally promise generally offer cheap deep insights, certainty, guarantees, where as the more realistic engineers are (in effect) saying "we have to spend some money". If you're not an engineer and know no better, and one "engineer" is saying "you don't need to spend money yet" whilst another is asking for a budget, who are you going to go with?

The best advice I can give to management is to look at track record very, very carefully. If someone has a track record of delivery and can point to successful in-service systems with their name on it, listen to them, give them the cheque book. If someone is putting up a lot of pretty pictures but can't actually show you some physical hardware (or software) that's been in use for a lengthy period of time, ignore them (or fire them).

Re: The fuse wouldn't be that long

I don't know how fast the first stage goes, or whether atmospheric friction heating ever gets high enough for external explosives to be "dodgy". Certainly things like the external fuel tank for the Shuttle got fast and high enough that it would disintegrate on falling back to earth. I don't think the StarShip first stage gets that high or that fast, so maybe it could safely carry external explosives for the whole trip. But, to my knowledge, getting explosives "too hot" is not a good idea, stability wise.

When we look at other programmes, the bit that comes back is generally not the bit that's dangerous at launch. Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz style rockets; it's just the small mostly fuel-less capsule on the top that comes back. The Shuttle had its fuel tank on the outside, and never took it into orbit. All previous manned flight has had the range safety package on a component that did not need to go into space, or did not need to survive re-entry.

It'll be interesting to see if the FAA decides that range safety for StarShip does need to be beefed up. On the face of it, it looks like it is. Solving it could be a tricky problem. When one thinks about the problem of re-usable space in the context of being able to blow it up if necessary, it starts to make the Shuttle's architecture look fairly good.

So Near to Success, So Near to Ruining it All

StarShip feels like it's a good idea, but only if it's become reliable enough that (like a Jumbo Jet or any other airliner) one has high confidence in how well it can be operated. Get it to be as reliable as, say, a 747 and it'd not need a flight termination system.

Safe designs can be dangerously operated. Dangerous designs can be safely operated. All mechanised transport is of the latter. SpaceX have shown with this test that they've got a dangerous design (nothing inherently wrong in that - all things that move fast can be dangerous), but they're not very good at operating it (which is why the FAA has grounded them for now). Fixing that could be a whole lot more painful than any technical design changes.

For example, a lot of commentards (I include myself in that description and set) are saying "flame trench + water deluge" is the way to go. Everyone knows that they'd have a much greater chance of getting cleanly into they sky, with that launch pad set up. So, why not do the thing mostly likely to be successful in 1) being permitted, 2) actually working? Why throw yet another novel, untested, unverifiable idea (the water cooled steel plate) in the pathway to success, proposing to try it out for the very first time underneath the worlds biggest rocket? That feels strongly like trying to persist with a way of operating which the FAA clearly isn't happy with. SpaceX clearly didn't understand their current launch pad's resiliency, what makes them think they'll know any better with a steel plate? Why should the FAA believe them?

They've come this far; they could ruin it all. On the whole, it looks like if they can get it cleanly launched, it would at least reach orbit. If they can reach orbit, they can use it, dispose of it safely, fit it with the mother of all FTS's to make sure that it really does terminate if required. Once it's reliably safe with more relaxed FTS requirements, they can take some time to nail re-usability (remember, re-usability was an add-on to Falcon 9, added once the rocket itself was more or less working).

They don't need to innovate in launch pad design. No one buys launch pads.

Soil Mechanics

When they light up this rocket, they're creating a very intense, very localised earthquake. The way soft sandy waterlogged soil behaves in an earthquake is that it liquefies, flows, etc, starts oozing out of the ground all over the place. So, what they've probably got in the way of soil underneath the launch pad at Boca Chica at launch time is soft jelly moving all over the place. No wonder their concrete failed - it likely had nothing of value underneath it.

So, if they're assuming that their concrete pad, steel plate is going to get any support from underneath, that's likely not the case. I think to do what they're attempting, they'd need a very large stiff plate of something to spread the load out over a large area, and (more importantly) to have some way of isolating the soil underneath from the vibrations. That can be done with, say a thick bed of gravel (as is done with nuclear bunkers). Trouble is, the gravel bed would compact each launch, and the whole thing may be too heavy and sink into the sand anyway

What you likely don't want is deep-sunk stiff foundation piles conducting the vibrations downwards and acting like tuning forks stirring up the soft, sandy soil. The way such piles are sunk in the first place is using shock and/or vibration. That ought to be a clue as to how suited to extremely strong vibration environments such foundations are...

If they're going to persist with Boca Chica and no flame trench, the best thing they can do right now is hire an experienced Japanese construction engineer. They know about structures, earthquakes, and rubbish soil. If one of those folk says, "Can't be done", they'd best give up and go elsewhere where they can have a flame trench and water deluge.

Of course, the beauty of the water deluge is that, not only does it protect the rocket, it protects the structures underneath it. In absorbing shock and vibration, the foundations are protected. Better to hammer away at disposable fluid, than have something that you'd like to remain solid fluidised.

Re: They may call it a success...

The full up, whole problem engineer everything approach is better. It doesn't even have to be slow, if you've got an experienced team. The trouble is that such teams don't exist very often, and get put together only now and then, and you have to keep them busy to keep the team together.

For example, the original Skunk Works - wartime priorities resulted in the best of the best engineers in Lockheed being lumped into a single team that persisted up to the 1980s and built such iconic aircraft as U2, A12/SR71, and the F117. U2 was done fairly quickly, the A12 wasn't too long especially considering how much stuff they had to work out. The F117 - kinda the last hurrah of the original team - took very little time and cost comparatively little money; this was most definitely not a try-it-and-see project.

NASA built a team and got man on the moon inside the decade, by knowing what it'd take to get to a point of launching a Saturn V and have it work first time.

Another - Airbus, created out of the Concorde program between Britain and France. Ok, Concorde itself wasn't a big commercial success, but the "we're working together" aspect was; that lead to the formation of Airbus, putting the best engineers from across all of Europe together. The A300 is a distant memory for a lot of people, but the successors have been wildly successful. Airbus got pretty good at maintaining this team, they (in fairly rapid order) did A320, A330/340, A380 (some development screw ups), and then A350 (perfect development) and now the A320 / 330neos (also have gone well).

SLS has had a difficult, politically influenced birth, but it has to be said that they successfully didn't blow it up several times before finally getting a near-perfect first flight of it. That team, if kept together and left to get on with it, could probably now do anything.

Unthinking iteration is all very well, but if it keeps going wrong people get worried and bored. Right now there's a bunch of SpaceX engineers who must surely know that the program has taken a distinct turn for the worse, and wondering if it's worth hanging around. The will, but it won't take too many failures (especially for "predictable" reasons like too flimsy a pad idea) for people to start looking elsewhere. Engineers are very good at knowing when projects are being managed to the detriment of achieving success..

Re: They may call it a success...

> Agile strikes again

The frustrating thing is that I feel this is giving all engineers a bad name (Musk isn't what I'd call an engineer, not by a long shot).

We're supposed to be people who can design things, get it mostly right, have a reasonably good idea as to whether something will work or not, and have a good handle on the risks being run in a project. Ok, so there's a lot that is "unprecedented" about Starship, but what most definitely is not unprecedented is that flame trenches / water deluge systems work. They've launched this thing, and are now suffering consequences they themselves predicted (Musk's tweet from 3 years back). This is not "smart" in anyway whatsoever.

This is a problem for engineers outside of SpaceX too. Say SpaceX had a really bad accident - e.g. people in Port Isabel got hurt. That would be scandalous, and there'd be a lot of "told you so" going on. That would dampen down any other similar endeavour, as people (quite rightly) would be questioning the abilities of engineers and the government regulator to assure people are not hurt. Arguably, we're lucky that launch didn't seem to hurt anybody, even if it did make a mess, but one feels it could have been very much worse.

Re: You beat me to it, but

The initiation of the abort was visible in the video - Scott Manley highlights it in one of his. So, the time between initiation is very publicly visible - no need to rummage through telemetry. What I don't know is if there is a second abort system on board; SM didn't seem to say so. None the less the idea of one of them having no useful immediate effect destroys the safety case.

It seems clear that there's far too many unexpected outcomes from this flight, if the FAA has called a halt. Having done so, there can only be a full up re-evaluation of the performance of all the safety-related things. For example, having lost engines on the pad, it now must be considered possible for this thing to struggle off the pad, tilt northwards, fly 5 miles and fall to earth; bye bye, Port Isabel.

Another bad thing about the flight; clearly, a lot of damage was caused on the launch pad. That likely invalidates any telemetry they have on things failing. If you're going to smash the underside of a rocket with large lumps of concrete, of course things are going to break. We know they lost engines at start, and soon after, but who can say what damage was inflicted. One could argue that with that much debris flying around and it still getting off the pad is some sort of triumph, but they'd far prefer to know the nature of the failures.

Re: The fuse wouldn't be that long

No need to see the telemetry / command data. Scott Manley has pointed out in one of his shorts on the firing that there was 50 second delay between the termination system firing (evidenced by new leaks opening up in exactly the right places - clearly visible in the videos) and the thing eventually breaking up. That there was a substantial delay between firing and effect is not in question.

If it's going to stay intact for 50 seconds, engines still firing, it can go an awfully long way in that time. Put into the context of if having veered off course having left the pad and heading towards Port Isabel, you could expect it to arrive intact, probably under power, and still full of fuel. It'd be like delivering a small nuclear bomb into the town. Arguably, they've had a lucky escape. Certainly, if I lived in that town, and the FAA said "yeah, 50 seconds is just fine", I'd be telling them it wasn't.

The idea of flight termination is that the vehicle is disintegrated ASAP, so restrict the distance it can travel following termination. Previously, that's not been a problem; rockets are traditionally built from the flimsiest possible aluminium by the cheapest contractor. Punch a hole anywhere, and it'll fall to pieces anyway. But, if you then go and build a rocket out of 4mm thick stainless steel, it evidently does not fall to pieces immediately (it didn't even manage to set the leaking fuel on fire...).

This could be really, really bad news for SpaceX; if they have to replace the point charges they did use for the FTS with linear cutting charges wrapped around it like a fishing net to be certain of cutting it up on demand, this makes reentry very difficult. You'd not want to reenter the atmosphere with explosive cutting charges still on the outside. They'd have to be got rid of, somehow, which sounds messy. If it turns out that an effective FTS is not going to play nicely with a heavy stainless steel rocket doing atmospheric reentry, then that could invalidate the entire design ethos, which could leave them with no program.

Re: They may call it a success...

50 seconds between button press and effect.

I'm expecting the FAA to be quite worried about that. Earlier in flight, that thing can go a long way in a dangerous direction in 50 seconds.

Re: Fancy that

It's there in case we start running out of tea supplies...

My experience of SystemD and it's view of "when is a network up?" is that it deems the job done if an interface has a link and it's assigned an IPv6 address to it. Which is ****ing bonkers, if there's IPv4 DHCP outstanding, DNS still to come figure, etc. I have to start a bunch of stuff in crontab some time after boot, because depending on SystemD is so massively unreliable. It's not like this is me not understanding what I'm doing whilst setting up stuff of my own, this is out of the box services like Samba packaged with major distros that don't work post boot because SystemD is ridiculous.

And don't get me started on start up circular dependencies. SystemD is perfectly capable of randomly failing to bring up the whole system - again with out of the box major distros stuff - because of such problems.

Likewise, but they always seem to get themselves into a pickle...

Heresy today indeed! Perhaps, geopolitical necessity tomorrow. You heard it here first!

The aviation business is a very big part of the world economy, and the western version of it is too big to fail. Merging Airbus and Boeing will at some point look more like common sense than losing out to, say, China. The logical conclusion to the fight between Airbus and Boeing is that one of them will go out of business, which is bad news no matter who you are. Companies failing and merging is what's happpened repeatedly in the industry over the past 7 decades, I don't see why we should expect it to stop. Better that happens in an orderly fashion, with the West still firmly in control, than for one or both Western companies to be mortally wounded in the fight. The democratic world's politicians will have to call off the competition at some point, if the industry doesn't work that out for itself first.

Re: Pilot Error

>Arguably the 2 737 MAX crashes were "pilot error" because they should have correctly applied the runaway trim procedure and landed the aircraft. But they didn't, and unclear instrumentation, <u>bad training</u> and bad design conspired to steer them away from the correct solution and ultimately led to them losing control of the aircraft.

I hope that, by "bad training", you're referring to the initial failure to disclose the existence of MCAS in the first place, and also to the advice given by the FAA / Boeing following the Lion Air crash. You cannot say it's "pilot error" for not knowing how to respond to an on-board system they'd not been told of, or for failing to follow a procedure that in certain circumstances was physically or intellectually impossible (or both) to follow.

As well as the failure to disclose the existence of MCAS to MAX pilots, there was also an issue in that any knowledge of the loads on the manual trim wheels had been lost to time. On the original 737 they were a lot larger and easier to turn. That was when anyone had last looked at what those loads could be. In subsequent generations of 737 the wheels remained, but they'd been reduced in diameter therefore giving pilots less mechanical advantage over the aerodynamic loads. But no one had bothered to revisit what that meant in extreme out of trim situations, because that "never happened". Then with the MAX, Boeing fitted a system that could cause extreme out of trim situations, very quickly, with no useful warning (MCAS).

Worse, they didn't even tell pilots that there was something called MCAS fitted in the first place (this was part of the "no training difference" Boeing had attempted to achieve between NG and MAX). Still no one tried out extreme out-of-trim procedures for real, and the aircraft still got certified. So, the Lion Air pilots were attempting to fix a system that their manuals didn't even mention, and with the fault they had the "book" advice was lethal (because it meant turning MCAS - broken - back on).

The advice given by the FAA / Boeing after the Lion Air crash turned out to be ill advised. The updated advise was based on try-outs in a simulator, not a real aircraft. The problem was that the sim was inaccurate, and didn't recreate the loads on the manual trim wheel. Had they tried it on a real aircraft, they would have realised that a pilot would have to have throttled back to be able to conduct the runaway trim procedure, and given more emphasis to doing that. More likely they'd have realised that, in the circumstances where a pilot was low to the ground, being told by the aircraft that "airspeed is unreliable", and experiencing strong nose-down tendancies in the controls, it would have been asking too much of a reasonable pilot to take an added risk and cut the throttles.

Afterall, low altitude + nose down trim + too little airspeed (what does "unreliable" actually mean?) + cut the throttles guarantees a crash.

It was the poor quality of the Boeing / FAA response to the Lion Air crash, evidenced by the Ethiopean crash, that lead to first the CAAC and then other global regulators grounding the MAX. It was effectively at that point that the rest of the world realised that it could no longer trust the US industrial / regulatory system, and realised they had to act independent of the US. If that isn't indication enough that the MAX crashes were not "pilot error", that there was no "correct solution" for the MAX + MCAS 1.0 failures, then I don't know what is.

Re: Pilot Error

NTSB reports are indeed well thought out, but are in themselves often inadequate. They won't criticise their bosses.

With the MAX crashes in particular, if one asks "why?" enought times about the certification you inevitably end up at floor of both the Senate and House of Representatives, where both parties for decades have been cheerfully trimming the FAA's budget. The current crop of politicians has kinda realised that this is partly their fault (which is why the FAA has been given some teeth again). But we all know that this is, one day, going to happen again when a new batch of politicians ask "Why do we put so much money into this federal aviation agency? Crashes don't happen, cut their budget".

That, coupled with how employment and business incentivisation works in the US these days, is practically guaranteed to recreate the same conditions that lead to the MAX crashes.

I've not seen anything from the NTSB criticising the politicians, the business / political system or the way they choose fund their agencies, or the politicians' failure to ensure a proper business environment exists to support safety. Afterall, the same politicians fund the NTSB. It's quite evident that the role of US politics in the MAX crashes has been carefully not looked into.

Minimum safety standards are only enforced if the funding to do so is not controlled by politics and business, but is controlled solely by engineers who know what they're doing. Politicians hate not being in charge of the bank account, but they've got a bad track record of managing it themselves.

Boeing's Blame Culture

Meanwhile, Boeing as a manufacturer has a habit of blaming pilots. They tried it with the MAX crashes too, briefly, until it became too obvious that it was their screw up that was to blame. They're still trying to wriggle out of liability, trying to not compensate families of the victims. If they cannot corporately accept that they've screwed up, they cannot corporately adjust themselves to not screw up in the future.

The problem with Boeing and the mess they're in is that, if you follow the "why" to its conclusion, the result is that the USA is now a bad business and political environment in which to carry out such endeavours. No Boeing CEO can truly adjust how the organisation works, because the shareholders won't let them.

It's interesting to consider the control a CEO / Chair has on a company. Steve Jobs famously had a vice-like grip on what Apple did, and what it spent its money on. Despite having more money than it knew what to do with, Apple under Job's stewardship didn't really pay dividends. Jobs wanted the money for his own reasons, and had sufficient control of the company and shareholders that what he said went. However, I can't really see that kind of mangement control of a company existing anywhere in the USA these days. If a strong Boeing CEO stood up and said "right, I'm going to sort this mess out and you the shareholders are going to pay for it", they'd be out within the day. Far better for such a person to set up a privately held competitor.

I can understand why some company bosses try and take the business they work for private; better to have private owners who "get it" rather than suffer the vagaries of public ownership. It also explains why some corporate set ups have hardly any voting shares, though that's pretty unhealthy.

Boeing / Airbus Market Share

There's a lot of too and fro in the debate about which company is doing best. However, I think the data in Wikipedia is fairly conclusive. This Table shows the aircraft actually in service across the worlds airlines. It shows that in the 14 years from 2006 to 2020, the in-service share shifted from Boeing:Airbus 2:1 to nearly 1:1. That's a huge swing in market share from Boeing to Airbus, in quite a short time (aircraft last in service a lot longer than 14 years). That's reinforced by the fact that, today, Airbus has thousands more aircraft on backlog than Boeing. Even more tellingly, what with the MAX grounding and COVID, Boeing has taken quite lengthy "delivery holidays", whilst Airbus continued to deliver at quite a high rate even during the COVID pandemic.

One of the reasons why long haul airline tickets are so expensive at the moment is because Boeing has massively under-delivered. Consequently, leased aircraft are at a premium on the rental market as aircraft that have expired their hours are grounded and have not been replaced. You can tell how badly this is affecting the market when airlines are dragging A340s out of storage and putting them back into service. Even the A380 now looks like good sense (Even Qantas have restored their entire fleet to operations).

Continued contraction for Boeing seems guaranteed, especially given that the CEO / board has said they're not really going to do anything about this by investing in new designs. The problem with this is that, with Boeing's performance continuing to be eratic, collapse seems highly likley, and probably sudden.

To Airbus, market share has been their key driver. You can make money if you have market share. You can't make money if you don't have market share. What Boeing has found is that, whilst their inefficiencies could be hidden and ignored when they had high market share, they can no longer be ignored now that Airbus has pinched a big slice of the market. A real indication of this is that Airbus, despite the commercial failure of the A380 program (as big an inefficiency as you can get) none the less managed to survive and thrive. How bad can Boeing be that they couldn't make Airbus really, really hurt with the failure of the A380?

Too Big to Fail? US Gov Military Motivation to Support Boeing?

I think you overestimate the extent to which the US gov is prepared to support Boeing. The US Military have had issues with a lot of Boeing made products of late - Apache, KC46, P8, Airforce One.

Apache - a mature, legacy programme - was inexcusable; the US Army sent a whole batch of brand new ones back because of poor quality manufacturing.

KC46 has had innumerable issues such as poor quality, it not being usable as a tanker at night, and its cargo floor clamps spontaneously letting go of cargo containers. It was and is a nightmare procurement for the USAF. Boeing used every dirty trick in the book to beat up the USAF to win the contract, and then delivered a shite aircraft.

P8 has recently stopped production because of a supplier issue.

Airforce One is very late. And, the cost of saving Boeing to the sake of future AF1's is probably more than the cost of a future bespoke design. For example, Airbus spent about $25billion creating the A380; it's going to take more than that to save Boeing. Paying Lockheed or Northtrop to do a one-off design is probably cheaper.

In short, there's not many reasons at the moment for the US Military to love Boeing.

Meanwhile, Airbus has at least one reason to be loved by the US Military, who clearly want the A330 based MRTT tanker (which is what everyone else in NATO is buying). Airbus, properly teamed up with a US prime like Lockheed or Northrop, could find its successful commercial designs being picked up by a number of US military programs.

Domestic Politics and Geopolitics

An actual Boeing collapse would be a huge issue, because all of a sudden it'll not be legally possible to fly a large fraction of the world's aircraft fleet. Certified flight operations depend on manufacturer-backed "design authority" support, which will have disappeared. That's the part that's "too big to fail".

Plus, if Boeing collapsed with thousands of aircraft still on the order books, it's not like Airbus could fill the gap quickly. That starts getting geopolitical, very quickly. The US Gov and Europe would not want a Boeing-sized hole in the commercial aircraft market filled by a Chinese State backed manufacturer. Some very strange things might happen, e.g. the US Gov asks Airbus to come in and pick up the remains of Boeing, keep plants operating, etc.

The ideal for the democratic West is that Boeing is restored to industrial, engineering and economic health. Aviation is important to the global economy, and no one in the West wants China to gain control of that aspect of it. It's therefore worthwhile pondering, how has Boeing got into this mess in the first place, to know how to fix it? It's related to how US businesses behave and are incentivised, how employment in the US works, and so forth. Boeing has chased profits and cost reduction because that's what shareholder have obliged them to do, and in doing so has accumulated vast debt, lost a ton of market share, has a poor product line up, and huge labour issues (e.g. they've just lost hundred of experienced engineers who've had to retire, due to the contract between the company and the union). You cannot permanently fix this simply by pouring money into the company. It takes wholesale reform of how business operates in the USA. That's a deeply political issue, and one that the US political system is uniquely ill equipped to address.

What's going on round the world is that everyone is looking at the USA / Boeing, to see if the US is actually going to do anything about it. They seem not to be doing anything (apart from a belated attention to certification practises). Some airlines are evidently buying Boeing partly because they're worried if they don't, Boeing CA will collapse and then there won't be any choice.

Airbus too are rumoured to be worried about a Boeing collapse; becoming a global monopoly would attract the most dreadful political heat. It's known that, in launching the A320neo family, Airbus were taking a bet that this would bump Boeing into (yet again) revamping 737. When Boeing responded with the MAX, apparently there was champagne popped open in Toulouse, because Airbus knew they could out-profit another 737 derivative. Then the MAX crashes happened.

I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect that Airbus seniors are now a little bit worried that they might just have overdone the whole "attack Boeing's market share" thing, sowing the seeds for big problems for Airbus in the future. There is competition, and then there's deadly competition. Airbus now know that if they corner Boeing even more, there's a danger that the consequences can be fatal. It's pretty bad way to do business knowing that if you're too good at doing it, your (incompetent) competitor might end up killing people again trying to keep up. At least the FAA seems to have sharpened its regulatory teeth again, to keep things minimally safe.

One way out of this is to allow Airbus to continue to become truly vast at a high pace, to get to a point where (from everyone else's point of view) Boeing is small enough to fail, ASAP.

Another way out is for the US Gov and European Governments to realise that an alliance on commercial aviation is needed. If a global monopoly is going to be the eventual result, why not arrange that in advance and avoid the chaos? That could involve the US admitting that, "Okay Airbus, you win", but ensuring a smooth transition from Boeing making (defunct) Boeing designs to the same people in the same facilities coming under Airbus-style mangement building Airbus designs, and the whole Airbus vs Boeing thing being buried for good.

There is already precedent for this: this is exactly how Airbus got formed in the first place - an amalgamation of European aircraft manufacturers. A politically backed merger between Airbus and Boeing is no different in concept.

Kodak - the irony being that wet film photography is becoming trendy once more. Like vinyl records. Adapt can mean, "survive", which is what Kodak have done.

Wet film photography at its very best is difficult for digital systems to beat. It remains in use in some quite important niches, as well as becoming more popular in general photography.

Re: I can't wait.

>By that, I mean validates a lot of the design & construction ideas.

One of SpaceX's traditional problems is that it doesn't. For a flight test to validate design parameters, you first have to understand what the design parameters are to measure and confirm.

Musk's approach of build and launch on a rapid tempo, who cares if it blows up is an attempt to achieve reliability without all that design analysis, quality control paperwork. It didn't work - Falcon 9 had schoolboy QC errors in its early iterations.

One classic example was the struts holding a He tank in place. They were not QCing these struts, and a tank came loose and the booster was lost. Because they'd done no QC on the struts they'd no idea how strong they were, except that they weren't strong enough. Post mortem QC of struts in sock revealed significant variation, due to poor material quality.

It wasn't until NASA got involved for human rating it and said that the paperwork was compulsory, after which Falcon 9 became reliable. NASA basically said that reliability achieved by random iteration was not good enough for crewed flight, because you've no idea what the safety margins are or when they'll turn out to be too narrow. You have to have a full up analysis of the organisation building it, the design, and measured confirmation of the margins.

Effectively SpaceX learned the stupid way what anyone else already knew, which was that design analysis and QC really, really matters. What matter most to SpaceX now that Falcon9 has settled into a tempo is audit of their QC, to make sure it's still being done right...

The same was happening on Starship / Superheavy, but then somehow Musk got levered aside and they've spent a solid year or so catching up, not launching anything, being far more cautious.

Re: Wayland?

The problem with Wayland's simplicity is that it pushes the complex problem of things like accessibility out to the app developer...

He was probably also counting on the opposition not actually want to win the job either. It's a pretty comfortable thing being an opposition leader, most of the perks, none of the responsibility.

Actually becoming responsible for the running of the country? Who'd want that?

Re: The Olympics have always been a political joke and a waste of time

Wow, that's news to me. I remember that a huge number of people went to Sydney, and they hadn't had much trouble building whatever venues were needed. It was said at the time (probably without being definitive) that it had been profitable. Maybe the cost overrun was balanced by a huge turn out of overseas visitors.

The influence of the IOC is pretty stinky I think. The design of venues gave that away in London. The IOC wants venues to have large amounts of seating so that a large crowd can be got in to make the event appear to be thrilling, boosting the TV audience.

That means that the hosting city's existing swimming pool or whatever doesn't meet the spec so they have to build a new one, which is never going to see a large audience ever again. Waste of money.

What London did was make the seating a temporary addition to a new building, took it down afterwards, leaving the sports facility without all that never to be used again seating. Saved a fair bit of cost, freed up the land for something else.

I wonder what's going on with the Paris Olympics. If they're having to build a new velodrome, that could be tricky. The wood for the track itself comes from only Russia...

I think that eventually, the Olympics will run out of steam. No one will want to host them.

Re: The Olympics have always been a political joke and a waste of time

Quite often its politicians that want it, and the IOC is dead keen on countries spending vast sums in self-engrandisement projects to boost their TV revenue. It's not an ideal venue for "sports" to actually occur. Some events, one wonders if one is simply looking at the results of various government chemistry labs more than anything else.

Very few countries have got the Olympics "right". Sydney, Australia did - made a profit. London 2012 is probably at least cash-neutral, with fairly well controlled costs. Japan 2020 could have been OK, but got ruined by Covid (they built whole new motorways and moved fish markets in Tokyo to cope with the traffic that never came...). Most other places it's been a big waste of public expenditure.

Re: Relax citizen

As ever, it'll all depend on exactly what they do with it. If it's used lazily, as a substitute for actual "thinking", there will definitely be problems. If it's used intelligently, well, maybe there'll be some small benefit (at most).

As always, it's how well do these things get set up. There's a fundamental contradiction in the requirements for things like this. First, it mustn't over react when it shouldn't. Second, it must react well enough when it should. There is no happy middle ground, because no one knows where that is. This sort of contradiction has been the bane of all such systems for a long time (including biometric systems, which are also generally making decisions with fuzzily ambiguous data). It takes human intervention to resolve, and if that's biased (ie. "I believe this snake oil"), then you've got judicial enquiries looming on the horizon...

Re: About time

And as Toyotas don't ever break, the spares issue never arises!