Im waiting for "one third of factory jobs require a four-year degree" before getting to excites about cerebral natures. There are a great number of people with degrees out there. I want to see that the jobs require the education to do the work, not that market forces mean that unnecessary degrees make an applicant more competative.
Oh OK, but this doesn't really distinguish between "market forces mean that unnecessary degrees make an applicant more competative" and "the job actually requires the knowledge/skills learned in college" (my words). Lots of businesses will just say "requires a college degree" on the job ad as a filtering mechanism.
A factory won't just casually add a degree requirement. That has implications. In a union environment this may require a higher pay scale. If they increase the minimum standards for a current job they may have to retrain people. There may also be a trickle effect on managers who may too now need degrees. So whereas a startup may just start requiring degrees to weed out candidates, a large employer like a factory (or government) won't do so unless necessary.
I'm just starting that rare job that insists on a "four year degree plus other post-graduate education" but isn't specific as to which degrees they want. That really cuts down on candidates. Of the dozen interviews, I will instantly be higher up in the organization than ten of the people who interviewed me. They didn't take the education requirements lightly.
It's probably a bit of both, but much more the former. Factories have become very automated: the stuff that doesn't need a degree is now being done by robots.
Almost nothing on a factory floor requires a degree. The article went over in painstaking detail how Airbus trains it's workforce. Do you really think that someone who didn't go to college is untrainable?
Somehow college dropouts built the PC industry, and the internet economy, and we still worship a diploma that is almost only ever used as a point of entry to the job market, then discarded immediately.
That's an article about how Siemens offers internships to high school graduates, so unless you don't count internships as jobs, there is at least one loophole in that statement.
Clearly Siemens sets high standards for who they want to hire and attempts to use college degrees as a filtering mechanism. But the entire article is about how trainable the workforce needs to be, and starts by talking about how high school graduates are flunking basic math skills needed.
You can learn anywhere. There is nothing special about university for the vast majority of people to learn there.
Fortunately thanks to the internet it's easier than ever to learn technical skills today, if you have any sort of work ethic and desire.
Looking at those pictures I wonder how assembly, from unloading cargo to final testing, could be fully automated. I came to think that until we automate automation it will be quite hard. Humans with assist of tools are flexible enough - especially on this scale.
The structure could be different. For example with latest composites you can assemble the dry fibers, maybe with some stitching to keep them in place, wrap them in a bag and use vacuum to infuse them with resin.
No fasteners and large monolithic parts. Sometimes you need an autoclaves, sometimes not. Things like point loads would need to be designed out as much as possible.
Likely because of large existing investments, politics and path dependence, the new airliners built differently will have come from somewhere else.
Airbus itself did disrupt the market with composites back in the day with their first plane, and they have a multi megawatt class electric ones in the works, so who knows, maybe they can renew?
Large monolithic parts are harder to repair. That's the upside to the current setup of panels riveted to a frame. Any one of those panels can be drilled out and replaced. Boeing has a special team called "AOG" (aircraft on ground) that will go out to a repairable aircraft that isn't airworthy and make it so. Kind of hard to do that when you need to bring along a megaton autoclave and portable cleanroom.
you will have to re-think the whole assembly process. And it's a bit far-fetched to think of an automated process for a A321.
I would try to design a small plane - such as the next-gen Cessna - that could be built mostly by robots. Maybe hire most of the engineers from the carkmaker industry (Mercedes-Benz, Tesla). Then move up from there.
I think the problem there is one of scale (same as here, actually). Hardly any small planes get built. Cirrus is the largest builder of small airplanes and they sold 276 new aircraft in 2013. These planes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but even if you slashed it so that new planes only cost $50k, you still have two huge hurdles:
1. There aren't very many certificated pilots in the US (600k?), and a small fraction who fly regularly enough for owning a plane to make sense. Not a huge market.
2. This does nothing for operating costs. Fuel, maintenance, insurance, storage all mean that even for a small airplane, you should expect to spend $100 - 300 / hr for operating costs, depending on details of the plane and how often you fly. This means that the market really can't expand that much.
The best hope for putting lots of new airplanes in the air every year is a viable self-piloting VTOL electric aircraft. I don't see anything else doing it, and energy density of batteries means that we're probably decades away from that.
They only employ 200 or so employees, as per the article. We are talking probably $10 million in payroll a year which is a rounding error at this scale. The automation fetishism is exhausting.
Payroll is a terrible number to look at to estimate if automation is worth doing. Automation provides ancillary benefits which are often more important than simply replacing people. For example automation can provide increased consistency (perhaps reducing human error?) for some tasks it can do the work faster. Sometimes automating things allows a company to do that thing more often.
There's a bunch of reasons to automate, and replacing people is probably the last reason to do it (since often the people just get shifted to tasks which previously didn't have enough resources to do, sometimes those tasks pay off big)
I think the point is that automation doesn't have to mean _total_ automation, with the lights out. Giving a human labourer a better, smarter set of tools can capture a significant chunk of the automation benefits, while also retaining the flexibility and awareness of having a human present for whatever the task is.
Ultimately, I think this is where we are going to end up. Humans will mostly exist for analyzing trends in the market and to improve optimize automation. Almost all manual labor will be eliminated.
I think it would be pointless to try to automate the assembly of airliners completely.
These aircraft cost in the order of $100M and they are produced in the thousands across many years for the most successful models. And it is likely to stay this way, it's not like if someday, we'll all have our own personal Airbus.
The economies of scale don't justify a fully automatic assembly line.
Not only that, but even what an outsider might think of as the same plane is unique per customer. Qantas wants the holes for the lavs here, while JAL doesn't care because they are going to use it for an all cattle class commuter flight.
The manufacturers fight it, but at the end of the day the customer is always right.
The question is how much of it should be automated that isn't already. It's not like they're building 737s and A321s for everyone - at some point, human labor just makes better business sense, though I admit I have no idea where those lines are - I don't have the factory experience to tell you.
It's also likely they'd pretty significantly redesign a lot of the parts if they were going for more automation - a lot of aircraft construction is done in a way that makes it difficult even for humans to get decent access - the robots to get into those kinds of tight spaces to work would look more appropriate on the International Space Station, and may not be much faster at the job due to all of the extra maneuvering to get in and out of tight spaces. (In fact, on most existing aircraft designs, to do much with robots you'd almost certainly need a human operator standing by just to make sure it didn't accidentally punch through a firewall or the tin can hull, since a lot of assembly steps require moving fixtures around and installing temporaries for support, which may be more ad-hoc than planned procedure.
As an example of design and construction philosophies, both Boeing and Airbus have adopted a more "outside-in" approach to building aircraft, where the principal components of the airframe are built first and everything is fastened to them as construction evolves. This is a very human- and aircraft-centric construction philosophy, since it means the workers need to move around the plane a lot, rather than the plane's components coming to the workers. This works better with the scales in mind, since the aircraft are already constructed in some of the largest buildings on the planet, and moving large assemblies around a lot during construction means employee downtime and slower delivery performance.
But what if instead they took a tunnel building-like approach where the interior would be mostly assembly-line built in ring sections, fastened together into modular inner compartments, and then fitted to external fuselage pieces before everything is snapped together in one big final assembly step? The smaller sections work better for both humans and automation, and the larger pieces snapping together Lego-like means you can even reduce the need for as many large assembly buildings down to just final assembly. It could possibly be much better for composite construction, as it would mean fewer external seams on the aircraft (which in turn must suck for the carbon fiber engineers, since it means even larger autoclaves and components they would have to deal with), which in turn gives you even more of the advantages you already are seeing on planes like the Dreamliner (plus likely a much quieter cabin, since it would be better separated and insulated from the hull, and fewer fasteners means less vibration noise generated as well as shorter assembly times).
Of course, Boeing and Airbus are huge companies with lots of extreme long term planning when it comes to budgeting and logistics, so I doubt if either company will make revolutionary strides in this direction rather than evolutionary strides. With product deliveries over multiple decades and lifecycles approaching a century, it's easy to see why these companies are conservative and evolutionary.
A more pertinent question is: What can be automated in a cost effective manner?
People from outside manufacturing look at automation like it's a holy grail - and it can be in some applications - but it has to make sense.
Step 1 of the evaluation would be to look at how much it costs to have a human do those operations now. This should be relatively easy.
Step 2 would evaluate what process changes are needed to enable robots to perform the operations. A robot cannot handle the material to be assembled in the same way a human can, so often a human (or other automated system) "stages" material for a robot. Robots do not work well on moving pieces, so you may have to stop other operations for the robot, impacting efficiency. Robotic vision systems need to be set up and debugged, unlike human vision systems (which have typically had 20 years or so of self-programming)
For automation to work well, the whole process chain has to be designed for automation.
Step 3 would look at the raw cost of robotic components and programming, which is relatively easy.
Step 4 would then evaluate the value add per operation of the robotic system.
All in all, humans make excellent robots most of the time, as they come with Two Six-Axis arms with multi-articulated effectors (hands), and a sophisticated 3D vision system. Humans have an on-board, self-sustaining power system, and are very mobile. Some humans are even self-diagnosing and self-improving!
Fascinating to see something made not in China, and even the components don't come from there.
(I realize they also do assembly and produce some components in China too.)
It's surprising to me how small the cargo-hold is. I've always imagined it to be a lot bigger, but now that I think about it (having seen it), it makes a lot of sense..
Yes, I went through the same process, obviously in hindsight it is a tube, all that can remain is the bottom half of the circle underneath the floor.
Fascinating look at those part assembled planes.
Interesting how a politics is just as 'real' as economics - the plane is purposefully built around the EU to spread the jobs and buy in from member nations, why not include the US in that too?
With the UK leaving the EU I can see those parts being moved to the US and more being done here. Pity it's because 'cheap labour' though -having said that the cost of living in Mobile, AL is a lot lower than the European sites I'll wager.
>> Yes, I went through the same process, obviously in hindsight it is a tube, all that can remain is the bottom half of the circle underneath the floor.
But see that's the part that got me. I subconsciously thought (without logic) that the passenger cabin part is the upper half and the cargo is just as big as the top half. Actually, the passenger side is much more than the half, and it looks like they've crammed in a lot of things in the remaining bottom portion, making the cargo hold even smaller.
Unit load devices (e.g. an LD3) have standardized dimensions, so you don't get much by having a taller cargo hold than any other widebody. At best you want to ensure that a person can stand up (or mostly stand up) in the cargo hold as it makes operations easier.
I think there's something else going on in these pictures. Some of them appear in focus over the whole image (large depth of field), which makes them look a bit synthetic.
I wonder if they're composite images, or just using some great lenses.
The photos are absolutely gorgeous, and it looks like whoever's taking them has some seriously expensive glass. I'm guessing that someone in charge wanted the photos to "pop" and the contrast got boosted just slightly too much. In my opinion it doesn't ruin the photos, and it's only really visible in a handful of them.
The photographer is Christopher Payne who does a lot of work that looks at humans making things. The colors and how they're treated in these photos is a product of his specific aesthetic:
I'm disappointed American Airlines don't buy all Boeing planes, especially given their name. Although Airbus planes do have some American parts on them, they're mostly European. Considering they got USD$15 Billion in bailout money from the US Government, and just how good Boeing planes are at a very similar price point, supporting manufacturing in their country of origin seems like the right thing to do.
That, and I also heard from an Airbus engineer friend, that airlines try to diversify their planes so that in case a specific plane model is grounded by the FAA (or equivalent) the impact is less severe.
Edit: As CoreDog said, it would be a cost nightmare. Already airlines would suffer massively if any type is grounded. Ground 737s or A321s? It would be like 9-11 all over again, shut down most every flight of almost every airline.
Even grounding a specific version of a type, like 737-700 would be difficult to handle for the airlines that fly them. Alaska would have to cancel nearly 10% of their flights. And it's hard to imagine how the FAA could ground the 737-700 and not the 737-800 at the same time given they are almost identical, which would ground 2/3s of Alaska's fleet.
Airlines can consolidate their fleets around a few specific models because it's super cost effective, and the chances of grounding any single model are virtually nil. 737s and A3xx have flown many billions of miles safely since their last incident, it's almost impossible to imagine a problems so urgent and dangerous it would require grounding an entire fleet of planes that flies safely every single day.
airlines would suffer massively if any type is grounded
It's been done before, but IIRC not recently. Sometimes you have to slap a manufacturer and an operator with a gigantic clue-by-four in order to get them to take things seriously.
Yes and no. The downside is that there's a limit to the number of type ratings your pilots can have. Then there's the operational nightmares that come with having to support all kinds of different airframes.
Southwest only flies 737s. In fact, they were so fussy about aircraft that Boeing had to _make_ them take an autopilot on the 737-700s that they bought.
Realistically though, if you buy IKEA furniture and assemble it at home, it's not "made in my bedroom". The vast majority of the value created in the process of of creating an A321 will be overseas. Assembling it here is just a gimmick, for better or for worse.
Boeing uses a pretty high proportion of non-US parts in its aircraft too, these days. This was one of the reasons that they had so many teething troubles with the 787.
Free trade works, you know. If Airbus makes better, cheaper planes, then forcing US carriers to fly Boeing would mean US carriers losing market share to every foreign airline around the globe. Every dollar we spend overseas has to come back to the US, either as purchases of our products or as loans to paper over our government's deficits (Thanks Obama, Bush the Second and Trump!).
If you want to know how bad things get when you limit free trade, google Smoot-Hawley.
These are some massive sub-assemblies being carted all over the world...it's surprising to me that there aren't more localized efficiencies, or that this global Lego set doesn't always have more missing pieces than its worth.
Rear Fuselage: Hamburg, Germany
Vertical Stabilizer: Stade, Germany
Forward Fuselage: Saint-Nazaire, France
Wings: Broughton, Wales
Engines: Middletown, Connecticuit
Final Assembly: Mobile, Alabama
Surprisingly, there was a report a few years ago that the distributed nature of Airbus also was more efficient. But yeah, it's mainly for political reasons.
There hasn't been a professional sports stadium built, ever, without an "independent report" that said building a large concrete mausoleum employing mostly minimum wage workers for only part of the year, and with rich employees and owners that spirit most of their earnings out of state, wasn't the greatest economic benefit ever for their city.
But doesn't a business have to, at some point, meet a minimum level of efficiency to still be viable? Do subsidies and mandates make up for all that slack?
It's not just subsidies and mandates, it's large government contracts on maybe not actually needed systems. See the F-35 as an example of this, which has parts manufactured in a majority of states meaning it's impossible for congress to nix this sort of program because it would cost constituents jobs. Also how it makes it harder for congressmen and women to vote against these sorts of deals because it would cost their constituents future jobs.
I don't know about Airbus in particular but this is how it generally work with companies like Lockheed and Boeing.
It's not just subsidies and mandates, it's large government contracts on maybe not actually needed systems. See the F-35 as an example of this, which has parts manufactured in a majority of states meaning it's impossible for congress to nix this sort of program because it would cost constituents jobs. Also how it makes it harder for congressmen and women to vote against these sorts of deals because it would cost their constituents future jobs.
I don't know about Airbus in particular but this is how it generally work with companies like Lockheed and Boeing.
It's not just subsidies and mandates, it's large government contracts on maybe not actually needed systems. See the F-35 as an example of this, which has parts manufactured in a majority of states meaning it's impossible for congress to nix this sort of program because it would cost constituents jobs. Also how it makes it harder for congressmen and women to vote against these sorts of deals because it would cost their constituents future jobs.
I don't know about Airbus in particular but this is how it generally work with companies like Lockheed and Boeing.
Only if there's sufficient competition. Boeing does the same thing, spreading their components across most of the US (and into other countries) for the same reasons. It's an alternate to conventional lobbying. Instead of, "Hey Congressman here's $100,000 for your campaign." It's, "Hey Congressman, vote for aircraft X and I'll move to your state and create 2000 jobs. Don't, and I'll pull out the 2000 jobs that are already there."
I would think that building planes, as expensive as they are, would mean that you would want to sell them to everyone. In order to sell in a country, you probably have to commit to building (or assembling) some parts of it in that country. Breaking it up the way they did probably is as efficient as they can make it now. I guess we'll see in some years how that turns out financially for them.
Did you read the article? It's as much if not more for economic reasons: Airbus realized that it could get more lucrative US military contracts by having local bases and chose factory locations partly for historical trends (of having facilities serving military-industrial complex) as well as other factors like lower cost and tax subsidies from choosen locations.
The split is political. It can be quite inefficient: When the Airbus A380 was in development, the non-unified production caused severe delays because only at assembly did Airbus discover that the electric cables are not long enough to connect the different plane parts[1].
I'm trying to remember where I read about Airbus designing the plane in two different places and when they built the thing it turned out that one place was using version X-1 and the other X and that caused really subtle problems with alignment.
I'm sure it was Airbus but I can't find the article.
You probably need a decent amount of engineers at each of those locations. Different types of engineers. I doubt you can convince enough of them to move to Mobile. Plus at the end of the day, how much more does it cost to ship assembled pieces vs. raw material?
One of my uncles has worked for Bell, Boeing, and Lockheed for the last 30 years. The mechanical complexity of aircraft, and the ability for a blue collar worker to master a niche aerospace trade, never ceases to amaze me.
What amazes me is that 50 years ago a plane like the SR-71 was designed on paper and turned out amazing. Fast forward to today and you have the over-engineered piece of expensive garbage that is the F-35.
> SR-71 was designed on paper and turned out amazing
Well, "amazing" is relative - it was a hastily constructed leaking bucket of kerosene, and within the first five years of its first sorties, one third of the planes have crashed and burned.
Not even Lockheed's other famous death trap - the F-104 Lawn Dart - was as dangerous as the SR-71.
(And of course the F-35 is supposed to be doing every single job under the sun rather than having a single purpose - hence it being outperformed by its Chinese single-purpose carbon copies already.)
This was the most striking part to me: "According to The Seattle Times, the starting rate at the Airbus plant, about $16.50 per hour, is comparable to the starting wages at Boeing’s passenger-plane plant in Renton, Wash. But the Airbus pay scale tops out at $23 an hour, while experienced Boeing workers can earn $45."
We now have so much surplus labor that even this relatively skilled job only pays $16.50 an hour.
Currently two miles from work with dirt-cheap rent while I build up my nest egg. Late twenties, single and enjoying the convenient nightlife. I'll gladly move when it's time to though (better school systems and all those family-life-community benefits).
Unions. Alabama doesn't have effective unions. You'll see similar differences in top-end pay in other Right to Work states compared to states like Washington with more effective unions and greater ability of employees to participate in collective bargaining.
And we are all talking about globalization being the culprit which to me is a huge distraction from the actual problem: automation. I wonder if it's not a bigger part of the national debate because it would require politics to say that currently unemployed likely will remain not needed and call for something like basic income guarantee which is in essence a gateway to something very similar to communism.
> a gateway to something very similar to communism.
At least it would be explicit. Western economies tend to have income redistribution in various forms anyway. It just gets mixed up in tax rates, tax credits, service subsidies and entitlements. People have little idea what the flows of money really look like.
The person who makes $16.50 an hour probably costs near $25 an hour. Cash payroll doesn't include employee benefits, including medical, dental, other insurance, paid time off, bonuses, and company share of payroll taxes. It's not unreasonable to estimate the entry level jobs pay about $26,000 a year in cash, and another $10,000 a year in benefits, for a total of around $36,000 a year. In Alabama.
You can't have a discussion about pay levels without accounting for total compensation. These are good jobs that pay well given it's an employer trained position that unskilled laborers could get.
The COL and tax difference isn't 2x. Alabama doesn't have unions, so they can't bargain collectively. That's the whole reason manufacturing has been moving south
Alabama is a right-to-work state, unions aren't as effective and there's significant action by local politics to suppress labor activism and organization
That's true and important, but it's very different than "Alabama doesn't have unions", is all I'm saying. (It's kind of like saying "C doesn't have static types" just because it's type system is far less powerful than, say, Haskell's.)
Mercedes reliability has always been a joke, as any consumer reports study will tell you. They are more a tribute to German marketing than engineering.
In any case, there are plenty of high end manufacturers in the american south. BMW and Boeing in SC, just off the top of my head, for example. Stereotypes are wrong, sometimes.
I think the latter part of this quote is disappointing:
American workers expect things to go wrong and then they fix it,” said Freddie Guinness, 25, who moved to Mobile from Ireland to manage the new facility. “We want it to go right the first time.”
How much does cautiousness result in increased productivity versus having the ability to have reactive responses to things going wrong? I've found this behaviour in other orgs, and often it was used an excuse not to train people to have the capability to remediate, but only to do what they're trained to do.
Also, as far as the age goes -- that's not that unusual for a line manager in manufacturing. Assuming they started working at ~22, 3 years in one plant can definitely make you a line manager.
If you've got a process where each stage has as its input a previous stage, improving the whole process depends not on fixing the inputs, but fixing the output of the previous stage. Getting into a habit of local fixes and workarounds may lead to a more resilient process, but it's also a less globally efficient one; fixes accumulate and the knowledge of brokenness stays local.
There are direct analogues with software engineering, particularly in maintenance of large or legacy systems - local fixes is how global architecture degrades.
A lot of this article talks about the US government subsidies and back rubbing required to sell to the US market. What about the reverse case? What is required to sell Boeing planes in Europe?
Last time I checked there are a lot of protectionism clauses surrounding EU aerospace markets.
"It helps that in Alabama, labor is cheap. Airbus set a goal that building planes in the United States would not cost a penny more than building in Europe. It is expensive to ship parts from Hamburg, but because the Mobile workers are not unionized, Airbus can hire fewer of them and pay them lower wages."
I think that's the money quote of the article. Large multinational corporations have a long history of moving factory work to cheaper third world countries.
Economic disparity has gotten so bad in the US in the past couple of decades that, effectively, places like Alabama now qualify as "third world" in that economic game.
South has always been an internal resource colony feeding the factories in the north. Now that services dominates the economy, all the activity concentrates in cities while the south manufactures.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] thread"Beware of propeller" seems like a strange name for a ship :)
1: https://www.vesselfinder.com/de/vessels/BBC-VOLGA-IMO-943632...
Wow.
I'm just starting that rare job that insists on a "four year degree plus other post-graduate education" but isn't specific as to which degrees they want. That really cuts down on candidates. Of the dozen interviews, I will instantly be higher up in the organization than ten of the people who interviewed me. They didn't take the education requirements lightly.
Somehow college dropouts built the PC industry, and the internet economy, and we still worship a diploma that is almost only ever used as a point of entry to the job market, then discarded immediately.
> “People on the plant floor need to be much more skilled than they were in the past. There are no jobs for high school graduates at Siemens today.”
These jobs also pay well (for factory work). $40k for a starting job at a John Deere factory. $50-$80k pay range at a Siemens factory.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/education/edlife/factory-...
Clearly Siemens sets high standards for who they want to hire and attempts to use college degrees as a filtering mechanism. But the entire article is about how trainable the workforce needs to be, and starts by talking about how high school graduates are flunking basic math skills needed.
You can learn anywhere. There is nothing special about university for the vast majority of people to learn there.
Fortunately thanks to the internet it's easier than ever to learn technical skills today, if you have any sort of work ethic and desire.
No fasteners and large monolithic parts. Sometimes you need an autoclaves, sometimes not. Things like point loads would need to be designed out as much as possible.
Likely because of large existing investments, politics and path dependence, the new airliners built differently will have come from somewhere else.
Airbus itself did disrupt the market with composites back in the day with their first plane, and they have a multi megawatt class electric ones in the works, so who knows, maybe they can renew?
I would try to design a small plane - such as the next-gen Cessna - that could be built mostly by robots. Maybe hire most of the engineers from the carkmaker industry (Mercedes-Benz, Tesla). Then move up from there.
1. There aren't very many certificated pilots in the US (600k?), and a small fraction who fly regularly enough for owning a plane to make sense. Not a huge market.
2. This does nothing for operating costs. Fuel, maintenance, insurance, storage all mean that even for a small airplane, you should expect to spend $100 - 300 / hr for operating costs, depending on details of the plane and how often you fly. This means that the market really can't expand that much.
The best hope for putting lots of new airplanes in the air every year is a viable self-piloting VTOL electric aircraft. I don't see anything else doing it, and energy density of batteries means that we're probably decades away from that.
There's a bunch of reasons to automate, and replacing people is probably the last reason to do it (since often the people just get shifted to tasks which previously didn't have enough resources to do, sometimes those tasks pay off big)
These aircraft cost in the order of $100M and they are produced in the thousands across many years for the most successful models. And it is likely to stay this way, it's not like if someday, we'll all have our own personal Airbus.
The economies of scale don't justify a fully automatic assembly line.
The manufacturers fight it, but at the end of the day the customer is always right.
It's also likely they'd pretty significantly redesign a lot of the parts if they were going for more automation - a lot of aircraft construction is done in a way that makes it difficult even for humans to get decent access - the robots to get into those kinds of tight spaces to work would look more appropriate on the International Space Station, and may not be much faster at the job due to all of the extra maneuvering to get in and out of tight spaces. (In fact, on most existing aircraft designs, to do much with robots you'd almost certainly need a human operator standing by just to make sure it didn't accidentally punch through a firewall or the tin can hull, since a lot of assembly steps require moving fixtures around and installing temporaries for support, which may be more ad-hoc than planned procedure.
As an example of design and construction philosophies, both Boeing and Airbus have adopted a more "outside-in" approach to building aircraft, where the principal components of the airframe are built first and everything is fastened to them as construction evolves. This is a very human- and aircraft-centric construction philosophy, since it means the workers need to move around the plane a lot, rather than the plane's components coming to the workers. This works better with the scales in mind, since the aircraft are already constructed in some of the largest buildings on the planet, and moving large assemblies around a lot during construction means employee downtime and slower delivery performance.
But what if instead they took a tunnel building-like approach where the interior would be mostly assembly-line built in ring sections, fastened together into modular inner compartments, and then fitted to external fuselage pieces before everything is snapped together in one big final assembly step? The smaller sections work better for both humans and automation, and the larger pieces snapping together Lego-like means you can even reduce the need for as many large assembly buildings down to just final assembly. It could possibly be much better for composite construction, as it would mean fewer external seams on the aircraft (which in turn must suck for the carbon fiber engineers, since it means even larger autoclaves and components they would have to deal with), which in turn gives you even more of the advantages you already are seeing on planes like the Dreamliner (plus likely a much quieter cabin, since it would be better separated and insulated from the hull, and fewer fasteners means less vibration noise generated as well as shorter assembly times).
Of course, Boeing and Airbus are huge companies with lots of extreme long term planning when it comes to budgeting and logistics, so I doubt if either company will make revolutionary strides in this direction rather than evolutionary strides. With product deliveries over multiple decades and lifecycles approaching a century, it's easy to see why these companies are conservative and evolutionary.
People from outside manufacturing look at automation like it's a holy grail - and it can be in some applications - but it has to make sense.
Step 1 of the evaluation would be to look at how much it costs to have a human do those operations now. This should be relatively easy.
Step 2 would evaluate what process changes are needed to enable robots to perform the operations. A robot cannot handle the material to be assembled in the same way a human can, so often a human (or other automated system) "stages" material for a robot. Robots do not work well on moving pieces, so you may have to stop other operations for the robot, impacting efficiency. Robotic vision systems need to be set up and debugged, unlike human vision systems (which have typically had 20 years or so of self-programming)
For automation to work well, the whole process chain has to be designed for automation.
Step 3 would look at the raw cost of robotic components and programming, which is relatively easy.
Step 4 would then evaluate the value add per operation of the robotic system.
All in all, humans make excellent robots most of the time, as they come with Two Six-Axis arms with multi-articulated effectors (hands), and a sophisticated 3D vision system. Humans have an on-board, self-sustaining power system, and are very mobile. Some humans are even self-diagnosing and self-improving!
Try a Human Today!
Fascinating look at those part assembled planes.
Interesting how a politics is just as 'real' as economics - the plane is purposefully built around the EU to spread the jobs and buy in from member nations, why not include the US in that too?
With the UK leaving the EU I can see those parts being moved to the US and more being done here. Pity it's because 'cheap labour' though -having said that the cost of living in Mobile, AL is a lot lower than the European sites I'll wager.
Unless Airbus finds it useful to keep factories in the UK, to sell to British airlines and the British military.
Or, because there's so much other aerospace in the UK -- Wikipedia has a huge list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospace_industry_in_the_Unit...
Broughton in Wales is not an expensive area. It's not too far from Liverpool.
But see that's the part that got me. I subconsciously thought (without logic) that the passenger cabin part is the upper half and the cargo is just as big as the top half. Actually, the passenger side is much more than the half, and it looks like they've crammed in a lot of things in the remaining bottom portion, making the cargo hold even smaller.
Four EU countries, soon to be only three. That's not purposefully spread, but the result of history and politics.
High contrast also makes tiny colorful details easier to see.
I wonder if they're composite images, or just using some great lenses.
edit: for the outside shots.
http://lenscratch.com/2016/08/christopher-payne-making-stein...
Edit: As CoreDog said, it would be a cost nightmare. Already airlines would suffer massively if any type is grounded. Ground 737s or A321s? It would be like 9-11 all over again, shut down most every flight of almost every airline.
Even grounding a specific version of a type, like 737-700 would be difficult to handle for the airlines that fly them. Alaska would have to cancel nearly 10% of their flights. And it's hard to imagine how the FAA could ground the 737-700 and not the 737-800 at the same time given they are almost identical, which would ground 2/3s of Alaska's fleet.
Airlines can consolidate their fleets around a few specific models because it's super cost effective, and the chances of grounding any single model are virtually nil. 737s and A3xx have flown many billions of miles safely since their last incident, it's almost impossible to imagine a problems so urgent and dangerous it would require grounding an entire fleet of planes that flies safely every single day.
It's been done before, but IIRC not recently. Sometimes you have to slap a manufacturer and an operator with a gigantic clue-by-four in order to get them to take things seriously.
In 1979, after a crash where 271 people were killed, all DC-10s were grounded for about 5 weeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Americ...
Southwest only flies 737s. In fact, they were so fussy about aircraft that Boeing had to _make_ them take an autopilot on the 737-700s that they bought.
Where do you think Mobile, Alabama is?
If you want to know how bad things get when you limit free trade, google Smoot-Hawley.
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/09/big_incentives_at_s...
I don't know about Airbus in particular but this is how it generally work with companies like Lockheed and Boeing.
I don't know about Airbus in particular but this is how it generally work with companies like Lockheed and Boeing.
I don't know about Airbus in particular but this is how it generally work with companies like Lockheed and Boeing.
I would think that building planes, as expensive as they are, would mean that you would want to sell them to everyone. In order to sell in a country, you probably have to commit to building (or assembling) some parts of it in that country. Breaking it up the way they did probably is as efficient as they can make it now. I guess we'll see in some years how that turns out financially for them.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/business/worldbusiness/11i...
I'm sure it was Airbus but I can't find the article.
EDIT: Found it http://calleam.com/WTPF/?p=4700
Offtopic but the "Catalogue of Catastrophe" is a damn good read http://calleam.com/WTPF/?page_id=3
Basically a "why things failed/cost a fortune that shouldn't" list for large projects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Space_Flight_Center
Well, "amazing" is relative - it was a hastily constructed leaking bucket of kerosene, and within the first five years of its first sorties, one third of the planes have crashed and burned.
Not even Lockheed's other famous death trap - the F-104 Lawn Dart - was as dangerous as the SR-71.
(And of course the F-35 is supposed to be doing every single job under the sun rather than having a single purpose - hence it being outperformed by its Chinese single-purpose carbon copies already.)
We now have so much surplus labor that even this relatively skilled job only pays $16.50 an hour.
Alabama is CHEAP, and taxes are very low.
How and why do Americans tolerate this sort of newspeak? Are you brainwashed to accept it from birth?
At least it would be explicit. Western economies tend to have income redistribution in various forms anyway. It just gets mixed up in tax rates, tax credits, service subsidies and entitlements. People have little idea what the flows of money really look like.
He argues in favor of decluttering the policy tools you listed. Sounds excellent to me.
Here's[0] a 3 bedroom, 2 bath home for 170k within 4 miles of the plant
and here's[1] an even less expensive one under 5 miles from the plant
If you look at the rental market, you can get apartments and small single family homes from around $300 per bedroom
[0]https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/307-Michigan-Ave-Mobile-A... [1]https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/210-Mohawk-St-Mobile-AL-3...
You can't have a discussion about pay levels without accounting for total compensation. These are good jobs that pay well given it's an employer trained position that unskilled laborers could get.
Alabama disagrees: https://labor.alabama.gov/inspections/unions.aspx
In any case, there are plenty of high end manufacturers in the american south. BMW and Boeing in SC, just off the top of my head, for example. Stereotypes are wrong, sometimes.
I found this this interesting, also that it was said by a 25 year old manager.
How much does cautiousness result in increased productivity versus having the ability to have reactive responses to things going wrong? I've found this behaviour in other orgs, and often it was used an excuse not to train people to have the capability to remediate, but only to do what they're trained to do.
Also, as far as the age goes -- that's not that unusual for a line manager in manufacturing. Assuming they started working at ~22, 3 years in one plant can definitely make you a line manager.
There are direct analogues with software engineering, particularly in maintenance of large or legacy systems - local fixes is how global architecture degrades.
Last time I checked there are a lot of protectionism clauses surrounding EU aerospace markets.
I think that's the money quote of the article. Large multinational corporations have a long history of moving factory work to cheaper third world countries.
Economic disparity has gotten so bad in the US in the past couple of decades that, effectively, places like Alabama now qualify as "third world" in that economic game.