[HN Gopher] Airliner Repair, 24/7 Boeing's traveling fix-it team...
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Airliner Repair, 24/7 Boeing's traveling fix-it team (2008)
Author : taubek
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-09-28 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| ygvamjq2ol wrote:
| From the photo at the bottom, the airline is Air Seychelles. And
| from that we can figure out it was in Paris:
| https://www.nation.sc/archive/218414/air-seychelles-b767-300...
| morninglight wrote:
| On August 12, 1985 over 500 passengers on JAL 123 died due to a
| faulty repair by this Boeing team.
|
| .
| morsch wrote:
| A faulty repair on the exact same component that's the
| centerpiece of the article, no less: the rear pressure
| bulkhead. Maybe JAL 123 is why they tend to replace them
| instead of patching them...
| jdblair wrote:
| Here's an AP story about the 747 that flopped into a muddy field
| when a takeoff was aborted:
|
| https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1988/07/25/491...
|
| Runway Accident in India NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- An Air France
| Boeing 747 jet carrying 275 peo- ple swerved off a runway at New
| Del- hi's airport and crashed into a field to- day after the
| pilot aborted takeoff be- cause he thought an engine was on fire,
| airport officials said. No one was seri- ously injured in the
| accident, the Air- port Authority said. Indian news agen- cies
| said several passengers on the flight, which had been bound for
| Paris, were treated for minor cuts and bruises after evacuating
| the plane through emergency chutes.
| seanc wrote:
| I think this is the very same job they filmed for the criminally
| under-appreciated Worlds Toughest Fixes. Interested persons with
| an extra $2 can watch a detailed-step-by-step documentary of this
| very job here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7GvfNcY70Q
| aaronax wrote:
| That is a GREAT show, possibly the best in the genre.
| crmd wrote:
| Video not available
| duck wrote:
| You have to pay to watch it.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| How do you do that? I don't see a slot that says "Insert
| $2" anywhere, just a notice that "This video is
| unavailable."
| beejiu wrote:
| Also available on Disney+ (at least in the UK)
| ss1996 wrote:
| How do they work around visa requirements for visiting engineers?
| Wouldn't that lead to few days worth of delay at least? They
| mention New Delhi in the article - Americans require visas to
| visit India.
| throwanem wrote:
| They also mention filled passports in the article. One assumes
| there's a team at Boeing whose job it is to ensure each
| increment comes as smoothly and quickly as possible.
| lb1lf wrote:
| Most countries can fast track a visa if there is enough money
| on the line for someone.
|
| Before I had kids, I did pretty much the same thing for a
| supplier of offshore handling equipment - seismic survey,
| oceanography, ROVs, that kind of thing. On more than one
| occasion we were sent out with tickets only to some major hub
| in the general vicinity of where we were going, giving the back
| office a few more hours to figure out how to have a visa or a
| waiver issued by the time we got to the hub.
|
| Whenever possible, we had work visas issued in advance for most
| countries we were likely to visit - oh, and a pair of passports
| to ensure, uh, incompatible visas didn't end up in the same
| passport.
|
| (An Iranian immigration officer once chucklingly suggested that
| if he could offer me just one bit of professional advice, it
| would be to NOT go to the US on the passport currently on his
| desk - with visas to Iran, Libya and Algerie, to name but a
| few...)
| scheme271 wrote:
| If it's a national carrier or a major airline, I think they can
| probably contact people high enough in the government that visa
| issues will be quickly resolved. If Air India is losing 200k a
| day because of a plane being inoperable, I suspect that they
| can get the Indian government to expedite any visas and allow
| people to legally stay long enough to fix the plane. Anyone on
| Boeing's team is probably really low risk in terms of
| overstaying their visa illegally or committing some heinous
| crime.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It costs $200,000 a day to have an airplane-on-ground. The AOG
| crew is Boeing's best engineers and mechanics. An airplane flying
| is earning money. An airplane on the ground loses money at a
| prodigious rate. Boeing's job, from design to AOG, is all about
| keeping the airplane in the air earning money as much as
| possible.
|
| I read that Microsoft also has an "AOG" crew, to fix broken
| critical software systems. It's a big reason why companies by
| Microsoft software rather than open source. If a company's
| software stops working, the company stops making money, and they
| want it fixed ASAP.
| gambiting wrote:
| I work in video games, for one of the largest publishers in the
| business - I can vouch for the Xbox part of that. If you have a
| game out there with a critical bug that makes it crash or
| interrupt gameplay for hundreds of thousands of players, you
| get direct access to the Xbox team, all the way to people
| behind the OS. Most intense 3 days of my life, fixing something
| that ultimately ended up being an unannounced change in their
| API behaviour that maybe looked harmless on paper but caused
| our game to be unplayable for about 2 million players.
| Basically Microsoft gave us direct line to their best teams so
| we got the fix in as quickly as we could.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Many large software and hardware vendors have something like
| this, sometimes multiple variants - a "fly and fix" team to do
| onsite troubleshooting or a critical customer program which
| usually provides project-management oversight to get different
| teams involved to help get complex problems fixed (but which
| might also have an explicit or just de facto ability to compel
| teams to prioritize certain fixes.)
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| So much so that I would almost count that as the definition
| of a serious enterprise software company.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Not just aerospace, I vividly remember the first, and last,
| time I saw an An-124 in person. They were hired to fly some 60
| ton heavy mining equipment, a gearbox for a ore mill if I
| remember correctly, from Munich to some place in Asia. All in
| all, from hiring the Antonov to it leaving loaded for Asia,
| tool 3 days. That included sourcing and transportimg the
| equipment from the manufacturer to the airport.
|
| Sometime time is so much money, that money is a seemingly
| second thought. Still the economics work out.
|
| Side note, I was sure to see you under this submission before
| clicking on it! A pleasure as always!
| smfjaw wrote:
| I worked at a rather large bank at the start of covid and we
| overnighted a bit of networking kit on a first class flight
| when everything was more or less grounded, I think there was
| a 50x multiple to the cost of the item vs the cost of
| transport for it, time is very much money
| niccl wrote:
| I used to have the equivalent job for a Rock'n'Roll lighting
| company. I always went to work with my passport in my pocket,
| and more than once hit the airport for a trip that would last
| a week with nothing more than a toolbox and a credit card:
| clothes and toiletries you can buy once the show has started.
| That sort of service was one of the reasons that people
| bought this company's equipment.
|
| There's quite high stress when having to fix something so
| that the 15,000 punters waiting outside can actually get to
| see the band they've paid for. Fun though, in retrospect
| neilv wrote:
| Those high-stress business situations, in which you're the
| one person who has to urgently make something big happen,
| often with uncertainty about the situation and solution,
| are... high-stress.
|
| _But_ you can play it as Astronaut Mode. Analogous to the
| spacecraft that will run out of air in a few hours, and you
| have to remain calm and sharp and fast-thinking, and in
| command and coordinating with others, maybe a touch of
| humor, to make a miracle happen. And somehow it comes
| together, sometimes more creatively than others. Stressful,
| but doable, and invigorating and rewarding.
|
| The stress that I think kills you much harder is when when
| it's a year of mind-boggling pathological big-corporate
| dysfunction, and you just aren't allowed to make things
| happen. (The spacecraft has a few hours of air. Various
| roles in mission control are misaligned, don't know what
| they're doing, secretly want that mission to fail, random
| people getting on the radio to countermand, etc. Even Capt.
| "Ice" Borland will despair when they realize.)
|
| Hence, do your own startup, or find a place you're
| similarly empowered to make the occasional stressful
| situation come together, without deadly Type BS stress.
| braza wrote:
| > I read that Microsoft also has an "AOG" crew, to fix broken
| critical software systems.
|
| From what I know, back in the day (more of less 10 years ago)
| MSFT had some Premier Field Engineer (PFE) that operated more
| or less like this, at least in some places in America.
|
| For databases, I saw some of those folks fixing quite complex
| scenarios of corrupted log shipping, spin locks, disaster
| recovery, fixes of corrupted of hundreds of GBs and so on.
|
| I did not had access but I read in some docs that MSFT used to
| charge almost thousands of dollars for that kind of support.
| rvba wrote:
| Thousands of dollars is.. not that much.
|
| When I was a junior strategy consultant they charged 175
| dollars per hour of my work. And the company managed to find
| clients who paid for days of such work, sometimes even with
| overtime. As much as I like to think of myself as a smart
| person, the decks that I made were solid but in my opinion
| nothing special, nothing really groundbreaking. Just standard
| strategy decks, based on "research" (google), internal
| analysis (data pulled from ass) or statistical model (excel
| with lots of assumptions). I also doubt they pushed anyone
| anywhere apart from making some sales.
|
| On a side note, the rates for tax consultants were generally
| lower, for example a partner charged 500 per hour, but they
| usually couldnt charge the client for more than few hours.
|
| So I could imagine those microsoft guys charing something
| like 2000 per hour, or rather something like 15 000 per day
| (because it sounds much better) for someone who is actually
| critically needed. Or maybe those guys think that others are
| ones charging high rates because the grass is greener on the
| other side
|
| (Obviously you would take maybe 15% of your hourly rate...)
|
| tbh sometimes I think the most important skill for any
| consultant is being able to find people who will pay for your
| services, anything else is secondary
| neilv wrote:
| I've seen Red Hat as potentially similar. Some customer problem
| comes up, and Red Hat can task engineers who are among the best
| people in the world at solving it. Plus all the work into
| having a well-engineered baseline.
|
| (Though I've gotten the impression that IBM has at times hurt
| morale at Red Hat, so retention and alignment of skilled people
| is a concern, so hopefully IBM is improving that.)
| bombcar wrote:
| Yep, you're not paying for a support team, you're paying for
| a support team that knows how to find Linus. :)
| kjs3 wrote:
| Regardless of what their impact on RedHat has been, this is
| old hat to IBM. They've had tiger teams like this on the
| mainframe and as/400 side at least for decades.
| rikthevik wrote:
| Yup. My girlfriend's dad was an IBM mainframe
| troubleshooter in the 80s. IBM would tell him to be on a
| plane in 45 minutes, go fix a mainframe, and then go do it
| again. I think he burned out after a few years, or maybe he
| quit when they told him to cut his hair. I know I don't
| have the constitution to be in permanent fire-fighting mode
| and short notice on-call like that.
|
| He's been a high school teacher ever since.
| neilv wrote:
| True, and I wonder how the care & feeding of blue-necktied
| elite paratroopers is similar and different from red-
| fedora'd ones.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Seems like this can turn into a "customer breathing down your
| neck" situation. The incentives and stress probably don't mix
| well with a safety first attitude. Imagine going to your
| customers business, into the belly of the beast and they're livid
| that your product is broken and it's costing them $200k a day.
| Your job is to fix it asap. All the rules and procedures in the
| world won't prevent your team from feeling rushed.
| landemva wrote:
| > All the rules and procedures in the world won't prevent your
| team from feeling rushed.
|
| While feelings are personal, team willingess to take unapproved
| shortcuts is a management and regulator item.
| nayuki wrote:
| Well yeah. From the article:
|
| > In 1978, a Boeing AOG team repaired the bulkhead of a Japan
| Airlines 747 damaged in a tail-drag incident. Seven years
| later, the repair failed in flight, resulting in an explosive
| depressurization that tore off the vertical fin and severed all
| hydraulics systems. Some 30 minutes later, the aircraft slammed
| into a mountainside; 520 people died in the second worst
| airline disaster in history. Investigators determined that the
| AOG repair did not comply with Boeing's own Structural Repair
| Manual. Boeing accepted 80 percent of the liability for the
| crash, while JAL accepted the remainder for neglecting signs
| that the repaired bulkhead was weakening.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123
| dotancohen wrote:
| To be fair, that incident is extremely isolated. This team
| repairs on the order of 100 airplanes a year. They had one
| major failure in the past 50 years? I am certainly not
| excusing that nor the loss of lives, however I can not think
| of any other team working on non-trivial problems, where each
| problem is unique, that has a lower failure rate.
| dawnerd wrote:
| And it's weird the repaired plane wasn't given a very
| thorough inspection the next chance it could.
| michaelteter wrote:
| Every airplane is unique. And considering comparatively low tech
| planes from 20+ years ago required 2-3 dozen (physical)
| maintenance manuals, one can only imagine the number of virtual
| pages of documentation required to know the details and repair
| procedures for each airplane today.
|
| For every series and subset of aircraft there may be countless
| special maintenance directives that are issued to remedy risks
| and problems. Managing those document updates is a big deal, and
| knowing exact and correct details of each plane would be
| essential to rapid repair (and knowing exactly which parts to
| bring).
|
| Not to take anything away from the amazing traveling repair
| experts, but none of this would be possible without HN-type folks
| building the data management and retrieval systems necessary to
| support it. So yay for us too.
| xattt wrote:
| > ... one can only imagine the number of virtual pages of
| documentation required to know the details and repair
| procedures for each airplane today.
|
| As much someone can write a procedure manual about how to fix
| something and teach it others, there is still a level of
| intangible skills, which come with long-term experience, to fix
| something that broken in an "organic" way (i.e. crumpled
| aluminum) that can't be easily described in words.
|
| This is what's "magic" about these types of rapid response
| teams.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Maybe said another way: there are textbook failures and then
| there are real world failures. Usually the real world
| failures are problems that go far beyond the immediate
| technical failure and stretch into incentive structures,
| human fallibility, deeper physics, and unluckiness. Those
| failures are worth sharing and you won't get help solving
| them from ChatGPT.
| philip1209 wrote:
| > Says Paul Amrine, quality assurance supervisor on this project,
| "Sometimes we go to work in the morning and end up having to ask
| our wives to bring us a packed suitcase." [. . .] Man-hours,
| parts and resources, and a time-flow to a rock-hard completion
| date are calculated.
|
| I had to do a double-take to confirm this was written in 2008,
| and not the 1960s.
| lb1lf wrote:
| -SOP when I did this kind of thing in the offshore business was
| to always have a bag with your kit and a passport in the boot
| of your car.
|
| The first few times I called my wife to tell her I'd be late
| for dinner as I was on my way to Macae or Penang she thought it
| was amusing. Her enthusiasm soon waned, and luckily I was
| bright enough to ease up on the unscheduled traveling before
| she really tired of it (and me!)
| kotaKat wrote:
| When you're in a specialized on-call role like this you know to
| expect the unexpected and I surmise they're excellently
| compensated for this level of knowledge and expertise on the
| playing field.
|
| It's the same thing with some hospital support teams I've seen
| in the IT world -- it bewildered me that our EMR vendor wanted
| to ship someone out next day to drop a replacement hard drive
| in just because one of the discs that's been mirrored three
| times over has failed. We'd live with the remaining 3 copies of
| the same data a little bit longer, but they saw that as a
| possible safety risk.
| bombcar wrote:
| If you've ever been involved in an NTSB failure report, you
| do NOT want to be the person answering the "so why was the
| replacement drive shipped by pack mule".
| FireBeyond wrote:
| While it may not be pleasant, NTSB investigations are
| generally meant to be blameless, no? Punishment is
| considered the lowest priority, reserved for specific
| intentional violations.
| Alupis wrote:
| It's vastly cheaper for them to helicopter in (figuratively,
| usually...) and replace a single drive when the stakes are
| minimal versus deal with cascading fallout of multi-drive
| failures and data/system recovery.
|
| This level of support is common for most high-end hardware
| systems - all the big players do this, including IBM, Dell,
| etc.
| infecto wrote:
| Why the double-take and reference to the 60s?
| pstuart wrote:
| Likely the "wifely duties" aspect.
| infecto wrote:
| That's what I assumed but thought to be a little silly.
| Sure people-hours instead of man-hours and spouses instead
| of wives but neither of those are bad enough to make a
| comparison with how imbalanced things were in the 60s.
|
| I don't believe the original article was really a call out
| to the wife's duty. Replace it with spouse and it seems
| reasonable enough. Too many unknowns to do a double take.
| pests wrote:
| The author is also speaking from personal experience. It
| is totally possible that (for example) all of his
| experience has involved him working with other men and in
| all instances it was in fact, wives, who did the suitcase
| bringing.
|
| I understand wanting to be inclusive but I think its a
| bit incorrect to police someone's memories.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| What about them? Do you think the emergency conference call
| with Hostile Nation Airlines begins with everyone reading
| off their preferred pronouns?
|
| If someone's wife is such a miserable person she can't help
| you out in an emergency, she is an awful person and you
| made a mistake marrying her.
|
| Do you think an airplane mechanic is married to an
| arrogant, self-important executive who is far too busy for
| packing bags to help you out in a bind?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I do not see a reason to double take due to that. Asking
| your spouse for help seems pretty normal, and 99.9% of
| aircraft mechanics that travel abroad on a moment's notice
| for emergency repairs being men, 90% of which are married
| to women, also seems normal. Even in 2023.
| bravoetch wrote:
| The 60s take is that the woman is at home, ready willing
| and able to pack a suitcase. In 2023 it's more likely she
| is at work, like everyone else.
| Horffupolde wrote:
| I like my wives at home.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This _particular_ job may self-select towards a (high)
| single income family scenario, though. Or at least a
| _highly_ flexible second income.
| Alupis wrote:
| Your spouse is incapable of going home and packing a
| suitcase to assist you simply because they also work? If
| you can't help out your spouse when needed, then you're
| not much of a spouse - regardless of your gender, income,
| roles, etc...
|
| This is a ridiculous take...
| bravoetch wrote:
| Yes, people can't just leave work to rescue an
| incompetent spouse at a moments notice because they
| didn't prepare appropriately for their 24*7 on-call job.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| My wife and I both lived this for a while, and we both
| made some pretty crazy sacrifices and trips to keep each
| other moving. We were equals and highly committed.
| pstuart wrote:
| Understandable. It's a bit hyper vigilant but the
| sentiment is likewise understandable (even going by your
| estimations there could be exceptions to the norm).
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| Agreed. And knowing that this is a regular occurrence, one
| should have a packed travel bag with them at all times (aka
| bug-out bag, go-bag, shtf-bag).
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