A proper language comparison...

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Tue Jul 30 18:37:54 PDT 2013


On 7/30/2013 5:16 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> I have to say, one of these days I'd really like to buy you a beer (or two, or
> three...) and have a long, long conversation about these (and other) aspects of
> aerospace engineering.  I imagine it would be fascinating. :-)

So there, Andrei!


> But I do think I'm correct in asserting that the particular disaster with the
> Comet didn't just result in learning about a new mode of failure and how to cope
> with it, but in an awful lot of new knowledge about designing safety procedures,
> analysing faults and crash data, and so on?

The disaster did usher in the modern era of crash investigation.


> What I mean is that I would have thought that with the number of flights taking
> place, there would be a continuous stream of data available about individual
> component failures and other problems arising in the course of flights, and that
> tracking and analysing that data would play a major role in anticipating
> potential future issues, such as modes of failure that hadn't previously been
> anticipated.  The example you give with the concorde is exactly the sort of
> thing that one would expect _should_ have prevented the later fatal accident.

You're right in that there's a flood of service data coming back, and there's an 
engineering team that is constantly improving the parts based on that service 
data. They track every single part, where it came from, what batch it was in, 
who inspected it, it's service history, what airplane it's on, etc.


> My point was that this volume of data isn't necessarily available in other
> engineering situations, so one might anticipate that in these areas it's more
> likely that minor failures will be overlooked rather than learned from, as they
> are rarer and possibly not numerous enough to build up enough data to make
> predictions.

I know that car companies will buy cars out of junkyards and take them apart 
looking for service issues, but yeah, tracking everything is too expensive for them.


> Of course, even if sufficient data was available, it wouldn't save them if the
> design (or management) culture didn't take into account the basic principles
> you've described.

Boeing (and every other airframe company) would be out of business if they 
didn't have that culture. What I find surprising is that other industries seem 
completely unaware of this methodology. They're stuck in the naive "the design 
requires that this part cannot fail" mindset.



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