"We've got it on tape"

[Mark Watson]

Originally Posted by Allan Black

I always think the classic is, when Airbus was building the first A380, the French built the fuselage and the Germans built the tail.

When they delivered the tail, it wouldn’t fit because the French used one computer program and the Germans used another. Company officials said the head of the A380 program, Charles Champion, sought to persuade the managers of the Hamburg design shops of Airbus to adopt the French software for use with the A380 as early as 2001.

He met a wall.

German engineers preferred to work with an older design software made by a U.S. company, Computervision. The program had been the gold standard of industrial design tools in the 1980s but was only capable of producing two-dimensional blueprints.

"It was partly a question of national pride," said Williams. "The German engineers sort of felt that there was a French solution being imposed on them. But the fact was, there was a tool being used in Hamburg that was behind the times."

Bet Boeing got a laugh out of that one.

Cheers.

I remember that well. Being a Boeing employee, I thought we'd get a chance to pull ahead of our competition. Of course, I'm not laughing now. Seeing my 1000 shares of stock go from $440 to $97 last year. So much for getting that Phantom Flex. The Airbus consortium is supposed to be ISO 9000 compliant, which would mean that all parties keep up to date software. As I recall, the Germans did not update their CATIA CAD software because the newer version that the French were using introduced lots of efficiency and it would mean lots of job cuts on the production line. When the German-built portion of the plane arrived in France, the wiring didn't mate up and it was a huge, expensive ordeal. They had to set up tables along the aircraft with rolls of paper where they'd manually document the wiring changes as they made them. If they completely shut down the line, they would incur penalties, so day shift would install wiring and night shift would remove it, just so they could say they was no work stoppage. Airbus also had an issue with their carbon-fiber fuselage, I believe on the A350XWB. They ran the electricals like they would in an aluminum fuselage and nothing would power up. Turns out the ground return circuits were attached to the non-conductive fuselage and they had to install long copper strips throughout the length of the plane.

Mark

[Andrew Smith]

I'm sure there are ways of making this stuff still fit together.

"Vee have vays of makin' you torque."

Okay. My bad. Best I could do. I'll just be going now.

Andrew

[Boyd Ostroff]

There's also this famous incident

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/30/u...on-errors.html

"Air Canada said yesterday that its Boeing 767 jet ran out of fuel in midflight last week because of two mistakes in figuring the fuel supply of the airline's first aircraft to use metric measurements."

Back on topic.... last night, a senator described the video evidence in the impeachment trial as "a huge pile of videotapes". I actually think he believed there was a big pile of tapes somewhere.

So, my question for the group is, what brand of videotapes do you use on your phone? :-)

[Allan Black]

Boyd: an Apple a day in my case. 👌

Mark: Boeings strategy of not following Airbus in building a giant competitor to their A380 paid off, by waiting for more powerful motors to power their 787 Dreamliner. Orders for the A380 disappeared and the line closed.

But then came the 737 MAX disasters and now the virus. But I saw Boeing is advertising for more staff. They sent me this last June ....

*We have various open positions in engineering, manufacturing, trades and quality that require active U.S. security clearance or the ability to obtain one. We have opportunities across the United States in:
Southern Calif.
Kent, Wash.
St. Louis, Mo.
Oklahoma City, Okla.
San Antonio, Texas
D.C. Metro Area.

Cheers.

[Mark Watson]

I vaguely recall some years ago trying to make the argument that DV tape was better than cards. I think it was because the wedding videographers would tell of how they had some data wrangling mishap and lost all their footage. I figured with my stuff on tape, even if my computer crashed I could always just re-capture the video and disaster would be averted.

SInce nobody has come up with a likable term for recording moving pictures onto solid state media, it looks like we'll have to wait until the next big change comes along. Maybe they'll make cameras with SIM cards in them so we can record directly to the "cloud". (or do we already have that?)

As for metric or imperial, I don't think most Americans are losing any sleep over it. If your job deals with metrics then you just learn to be fluent in both. I remember when they put the speed limit signs up in both KPH and MPH, and that was pretty much the extent of the campaign. They just never made a very strong case to change over. No perceived benefit to most people.

Alan: Always great to get offers.

Mark

[Allan Black]

Mark, I should clarify my offer from Boeing last June. It came in their newsletter which many others would have received as well. I thought it was strange because Boeing laid off 7000 workers a month earlier, due to the pandemic cancelling orders.

Cheers.

[Patrick Tracy]

It might have been smarter to divide the meter by 360 than by 1000. You can divide 360 evenly by 23 numbers. You can divide 1000 by only 16 numbers.

[Greg Miller]

I don't buy that. Look at the difficulty people have calculating times, using base 6 math to carry seconds to minutes and minutes to hours. And some people seem to have trouble even with 1/8, as in adding or subtracting eighths of an inch. I can't imagine talking about 9th of a meter, 45th of a meter, 72nd of a meter, etc. Much easier to move the decimal point.