The Politics of Aircraft

[davidivad]

I find if amusing that our politicians are looking for someone to take the fall for our recent rash of misguided investments.

The politicians are clearly the ones responible for setting the bar too high and trying to manhandle the science behind our technology.

Who decided that we need to demand that an aircraft must be built to accomodate more than one specialized role and only fund the winner. is the aircraft company at fault? of course not. they must comply with the request when it will only be bought if it meets such criteria. they further insult cooperation by overseeing all aspects of such operations. this was a clear attempt by politicians to control the development of technology. what do we learn from this? it takes an act of god for them to realize that thier very interest in such affairs is the root cause. why not istead of blaming someone, publicly announce that such endeavors can not be oversighted in such a controled fashion. they even invested before a finnished product out of the arrogance of thinking they were in control.

 

face it, if you want an airplane built correctly, you do not want a politician to do it...

if you want someone to make a mess ask a politician...

i am just curious as to any other perspective out there on the subject.

 

Edited May 1, 2014 by davidivad

[Roamer]

 

 

i am just curious as to any other perspective out there on the subject.

 

Do you have a linky or something ?

I don't know which government nor which aircraft you're talking about.

[davidivad]

sorry,

i am talking about american airplanes of recent times.

consider the f-22 and f-35.

it was a political effort from the start and ended up like every other political situation. everybody shaking thier heads in disbelief and pointing fingers.

[CaptainPanic]

Not only politicians make this error. If you allow your set of requirements for the design to be drafted by a committee who do not know the consequences of adding too many requirements to the list, you end up an absolute monster of a project. But this problem occurs also in the commercial world.

 

Starting off from a reasonable list of requirements, every additional requirement comes at a cost: either money or time must be thrown into the project (usually both), and the project will get larger or more complicated... Take the F35: if they had wanted a strike fighter with stealth capabilities, the plane would already be flying now. But it had to do vertical take off and landing too (and much more). That sounds easy on paper, but it really isn't. So, the costs went up. The complexity went up. The phyisical size of the plane probably went up too, or its payload went down.

 

Governments will generally tender such a construction, so the company that offers the best pre-design, at the lowest cost will get the contract. So, engineers cannot negotiate about the list of requirements (or the other company gets the contract). Unfortunately, this is necessary, because the past has shown that if governments don't do this, the corporations will just run away with the money and deliver an overpriced and underachieving product. However, it is the job of the engineers to deliver a feasible design at the cost that is asked. I think it is often the management in such large corporations who pressure their engineers to bend the laws of physics to design something that matches the exact wishlist, and that is cheaper than the competition (or, at least, the management will treat the best-case scenario as a pessimistic scenario, and then lower the price of that, and promise a few extra features).

 

I am not sure who should be blamed here. Politicians guard our tax money, so at some point they must be involved to see if that is spent wisely. The situation where they just shove some money into the military, and hope for the best is also very undesirable. I think the major blame is actually with the management of the aircraft manufacturers who fought over the contracts, and who made the pre-design. They should have had the guts to say that the government/military was asking for too much. Somewhere between those managements and their own engineers, the communication must be quite rotten.

[davidivad]

i guess the question that stands out for me is whether or not a study can be done that compares more successful builds to our latest builds.

while the complexities are different and may need different handling, i feel that such a study might reveal valuable clues within the data that may improve the over all management of such projects. after all, statistics is used to solve our greatest problems so why not put it to work for us where we are failing.

 

perhaps a study on other high tech projects that have been effective. Consider the LHC. while it has been rather expensive, it is answering some of greatest questions mankind has to ask. pound for pound it delivered. this isn't just a big project - it is multi-national. perhaps we should ask our scientists to handle the aircraft affair.

 

i still say that the oversight committee is named that way not because it has oversight but because there has been one already. gosh darn it, they went and labeled themselves and if that doesn't speak volumes i don't know what does. was that an oversight too?

 

our government is broke and yet we rely on politicians expecting them to control our technology too. at this rate we will soon be back to flinstone cars and lobbing rocks at each other to communicate. penny gum will cost ten dollars by then (due to the evolving complexities of factory technologies, an oversight committe is needed).

Edited May 2, 2014 by davidivad

[arc]

The British Imperial Airship Scheme;

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-london/plain/A954678

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Airship_Scheme

 

The more things change . . . . . .