From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Sun May 26 2002 - 15:35:15 MDT
On Sun, May 26, 2002 at 08:58:25AM -0600, TT wrote:
>
> Again, the only reason I'm guessing that this is a likely scenario is that
> 1) this type of sabotage between European and American business is not even
> remotely unprecedented,
Ahem: speaking for myself, I've never heard of it. (Or rather, the only
cases I can say for sure I _have_ heard of involving industrial espionage
involved the KGB or GRU -- neither of whom are in the airliner biz this
decade.)
I _have_ heard of the Boeing investigation, but was under the impression
it relates to the 737 production line and some kind of labour dispute was
implicitly being blamed.
> 2) many of the Boeing airframes that are currently
> having \"problems\" are old and proven systems,
Does the term Mean Time Before Failure ring any bells? If the wiring in
a 747-200's center-line fuel tank has an MTBF of 100,000 hours, then at
10 hours in the air per day, it'd take an average of 10,000 days, or
about 30 years, for a tank to fail on a given plane. One would therefore
expect 747-200's to begin falling out of the sky in large numbers around
now (as the type is coming up on thirty years old). If it's not a normal
distribution, but one with a very flat tail on the left of the curve (say,
because material degradation is implicated which doesn't get underway
significantly in the first 20 years of airframe life) then this would
match the pattern we're seeing -- an "old, proven" system suddenly begins
showing an inexplicable and lethal fault with increasing frequency.
-- Charlie
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