Titan Submersible. Engineering is Expensive

Posted by $ Abaco 1 year, 4 months ago to Culture
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The submersible disaster reminds me of something I learned early in my engineering career. Engineering is expensive (sarcasm). Years ago there was a small jet that was being marketed as a personal supersonic aircraft. I was familiar with the company president from my background as an aerobatics pilot - and was saddened when the jet disintegrated in flight testing, killing him. I was called in to do an FEA modal analysis of the mods done on the second prototype so they could go ahead with development. I saw things in the airframe I really didn't like and told the 2nd company president (also a retired fighter pilot) "You really should have us go through the entire airframe, nose-to-tail, to look at your structure." He just looked at me and said, "We know what we're doing." In fact, they didn't have an structures engineer on staff. About two months later I got the call that he perished in the crash of the second prototype. A very cheap part of the controls failed in that case. After that, over the years, I'd often joke "Engineering is expensive" whenever a highway bridge would collapse, a single angle-of-attack on a jet liner would freeze up, etc. This accident reminds me of that. When will people learn? If you can afford that entire operation, and you're charging about $250K/head for trips, you can afford to have an extensive structural analysis done on your ship. Nope. Engineering is expensive...


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  • Posted by $ Markus_Katabri 1 year, 4 months ago
    My favorite (sarcasm) was when they’d ask for my recommendation when sourcing automation equipment. I’d give it and layout my reasons for choosing what I did.
    The specs would go out to the machine builder In Italy. Then the finished product would come back with different parts than I specced. When I inquired as to what happened I found out the president of the company changed the spec because he wanted the new machines to “match” the machines already out on the floor. Which were buggy pieces of shit. He thought it would make it “easier” for us to trouble shoot them. If they had just done what I said to begin with there would have been virtually no need to trouble shoot them because there was an earlier group of machines that had proprietary hardware of the machine builder that we NEVER had to screw with because they simply WORKED. I ended up spending the next 3 months patching the buggy ladder logic.
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    • Posted by $ 1 year, 4 months ago
      Yep. There it is.

      When the governor of California asked for the first emergency response data for covid 19 I said that building owners should try to target up to 6 air changes per hour. Our management (no mechanical engineering background) changed it to 4 because "6 is hard". Well....you know the rest of that story...
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      • Posted by mhubb 1 year, 4 months ago
        i am still waiting to hear the hospital system i work for has installed UV systems in the Air Conditioning systems.....

        will never happen as they all know the covid was a scam
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