Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Mentour Now!" channel.

It is a shame that airlines and even other employers have no way in which to track the age of their employees and potentially predict the utterly unpredictable, completely random age in which employees may retire. Maybe we should ask governments to suggest a retirement age, which could make predicting such things possible. Oh wait, that would require management to jump off of the just in time bandwagon and anticipate predictable things, prepare in advance for them and retain a certain level of excess personnel to act as a buffer should there be a sudden loss and that is definitely not lean six sigma! Decades of promoting just in time ordering and lean philosophy has gone as we predicted, disruptions in supply chains and traffic flow have disrupted everything up and downstream and retirements are adding to the hot mess. Again, as predicted when we took that training that is only ever effective in an undisturbed steady state environment. But, people that were in the field for 20 - 30+ years didn't know what they were talking about and needed to have a positive attitude. I was quite positive it'd blow up in their faces. So, we're short flight crews, infant formula due to one plant going offline out of a dozen and a tampon shortage, that due to hand wave cotton and plastic shortages... And the ones that need to be shown the door for such business harming shortsightedness will retain their platinum parachutes, while everyone else gets lead parachutes. </0.01% spleen venting completed, detonation averted>
12
@Naptosis I remember the pre-GPS days, when the St Louis Arch was a big thing due to precision measurements. 1/128th of an inch off, the arch wouldn't have met in the middle. And I still ponder my cable humping days, when one discussed getting a cable stretcher... ;)
10
Indeed and it eliminates the risk of more rubbish falling from the sky, dangling from a parachute while holding a selfie stick. Seriously, if he had landed upon my land, I'd be on the line with 911 reporting, "Oh no, we have Spaceballs".
10
@V100-e5q well, water showers in the form of fire hoses. I can just picture their head slapping as they realized they didn't account for expansion of steel with heat. That's a hell of a lot of pressure to dissipate every day!
7
Boeing was notorious for generations now for mass layoffs of skilled workers. It's literally one reason I avoided the company, despite living within walking distance from a VERTOL plant. Employers love reliable employees, too many employers forget that employees absolutely require reliable income.
7
@UserDefaultEurope the orbiters never had a fault that was fatal, for one, the SRB O ring failure allowed the fuel to burn through and impact the external fuel tank, for the other, ice broke off and damaged the heat resistant tiles protecting the orbiter. Both were external issues that destroyed the orbiter, but without the SRB's or external fuel tank, the orbiter would've been incapable of getting off of the ground, let alone living up to the title orbiter.
6
Well, the upside is that there are several options besides US or Russian birds for position information. Still, an out of band method, like VOR is always a good idea, just in case orbital conditions are insanely too noisy, such as from solar activity. The propeller hat community goes nuts over EMP, never realizing or accepting that Sol, our own treasured sun hits our planet with radiation that makes an EMP look like a cheap firecracker next to a nuke. I've known that for decades, as I had to rely upon satellite communications and on occasion, things got tricky, to put it mildly. I also tend to have to reboot devices whenever a geomagnetic storm hits, likely from ground currents in the local geology. :/
6
Now, now, can't upset the US judicial system apple cart. We must maintain the two tier judicial system, where the poor get steamrollered into compliance and the wealthy do whatever they want with absolute impunity.
5
At first, the UltraFan seemed to basically be a dusting off of some rather older designs and in some ways, it is. With the twist of variable pitch. Initially, I was confused as to the lack of an outer ring to both duct and spread out stresses, but the variable pitch would render that idea impractical. Then, I pondered stresses involved and the next item listed was gear reduction, lowering RPM's and hence, those stresses. So, overall, intriguing designs and may result in the reintroduction of gull wing designs as well. A greater advantage is, now we've got excellent computer modeling, which was impossible when such things were briefly experimented with in the past. And given we've gotten a helicopter to fly on Mars, this should be much easier!
4
Oh never fear, AI will come to the rescue. Which will then create a new boom in roof repair and building construction...
4
@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket you do know that there's lower accuracy with the civilian vs the military GPS, don't you? And they can always turn selective availability back on again, lowering the civilian accuracy even more. The quote justifying the lower accuracy was, "Suppose someone wanted to fly a cruise missile into the Oval Office window?", as if GPS was and is the only game in town for military missiles. Military GPS uses additional data bits and multiple receivers, civilian GPS uses single receiver. The civilian is augmented with WAAS, but that's North America only. Just as my M4 I lugged around in the Army is a wee bit different than what civilians buy, as milspec has specific standards to ensure that the weapon operates under a very wide environmental set of conditions, from arctic to tropical and most civilians don't want to pay for that additional capability and expense.
2
What surprises me is, there were no flags in his record to alert someone generating the roster that he required a line check pilot. The more that you make things foolproof, the less errors that you can make.
2
You anticipated my question about SAF and seals. I don't foresee that being an easily resolved problem though, as that's basically a problem as old as engines themselves. We used jet-A for fuel in our diesel tugs, which caused our usage of motor oil to increase by a fair amount. Still, with enough research, a solution will eventually be found. Then, we'll only have nitrogen problems...
2
Wiring and a ton of fiber optic cable. Every communications cable installed to full TEMPEST requirements. The pricing overrun sounds like an inexperienced contracting team treating this as a standard military contract, but specialized requirements that the government had in the specifications makes things get really expensive, really, really quickly. Hell, just the crypto devices are enough to impact weight and balance! Add in power filtering requirements to avoid leakage and crosstalk, specialized mission equipment, yeah, total nightmare for anyone inexperienced with such science projects.
1
@jimle22 it always comes back to management, because most failures are found to result from a lack of leadership being present within the organizational culture. If the leadership does not buy in and fully support safety programs, as just one example, support for those programs erodes, corners get cut in an ever narrowing spiral until one gets components falling off, O rings freeze and fail and well, it starts raining aircraft and spacecraft. Oh, just heard another 1 in 10000 chance event involving NASA. A family found some odd junk raining down on their home, turned out to be batteries ejected from the ISS three years ago. Estimated chances of that debris landing in an inhabited area, 1 in 10000.
1
Kind of difficult to reach a destination beyond a conflict area, especially for national airlines primary routes. When I flew from the US to Qatar, the aircraft had a connecting flight in Europe, then to Qatar, flying over Iraq during the war. All windows shades had to be closed while over Iraq. One isn't going around that long a distance, so overflight was necessary.
1
I'm confused, how is there a shortage of Halon, given FM-200 is a drop in replacement for the old and banned Halon? Also, is there a recommended and actually safe transport container that can carry lithium batteries and would contain burning battery packs? A few that I looked at were dubious at best.
1
Heh, steam gauges. Yep, EMP is rather serious, both local or if it's a major hit above the thermosphere, where it's far nastier. Animal sourced fertilizer, I'm gonna have to steal that one. I am a tiny bit surprised at the 8 - 10 requirement, it was previously a half dozen. Wiring, that's largely fiber now. Can't discuss that further at all. Or booze bottles found inside of an aircraft under construction. Boeing is doing Boeing, it's looking out for its own interests, rather than previous prestige. And I anticipate a change of course, post door blowing off impacting, well, prestige. See excrement striking primary impeller... And right alongside uncontained fan failure.
1
Hydrogen fuel, wonderful stuff, ignore hydrogen embrittlement, that got fixed by a hand wave. Boeing, they do have a space division that explored hypersonic flight and lifting bodies, which may be leveraged into their commercial aircraft. Giving a wider body, additional lift and smaller size. As increasing size has another side you didn't cover. Revenue flights that could, say, as a thought experiment, have a capacity of 1000 passengers, but paying passengers only number 100.
1
Safety culture and convincing the public... Two entirely different things, one can con the public and still not have any semblance of a safety culture. But, reputation is something that once was important, but now seems to have been forgotten. It can take one 20 years or more to build a good reputation, it takes less than 20 seconds to ruin that reputation. Suddenly one doesn't seem to have critical safety procedure documentation, when one is supposed to have said documentation is, well yet another 20 seconds added on blowing a reputation straight into a pig's breakfast. If I had stock in Boeing, I'd have already filed litigation on their pissing away my investment money via failed and ignored fiduciary duties to maintain quality, thereby reputation, thereby stock value.
1
I'm totally down with flying with a parachute, they make some really nice models for pretty much every general aviation aircraft out there. The aircraft will be totaled, but the occupants will survive in good to excellent condition. As for the video, there's an old saying, "the guy's more full of shit than a Christmas goose". Figure he'll get jacked up on intentionally damaging a protected wildlife preserve, polluting said reserve, insurance fraud and whatever else the federal attorney dreams up. If there's one thing the US government is good at, it's locking people away in prison, with hermetically sealed cases.
1