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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Back when I worked at Boeing they had the AOG (Airplane On Ground) crew to do this sort of thing. Their job was to be on call 24/7 and do whatever it took to get that airplane back in the air, and they pretty much had a blank check to do it.

Naturally, they were the best mechanics Boeing had.

An airplane makes money only when it is flying. When it is sitting on the ground, it loses money at a prodigious rate. A large focus of the engineering on the 757 I worked on was to keep that airplane flying as much as possible.

I understand that Microsoft has a similar crew they can dispatch to any customer to get their business software working again. This is how Microsoft is able to successfully compete against free software.

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> I understand that Microsoft has a similar crew they can dispatch to any customer to get their business software working again.

There is a saying that these teams are dispatched by private jet and consist of 8 executives and 2 engineers.

I imagine these 8 executives are there to lay down suppressive fire, keeping customer's management at bay so that the engineers can go in and fix the problem uninterrupted.

Hehe. The comparison is both amusing and apt. I’m often in the “executive” position in this scenario and this barrier between the angry team/customer/partner and the people doing engineering work really pays in spades. The people doing the “real” work on both sides usually avoid animosity and the management teams slugging it out in conference rooms usually understand that the dance they’re doing is just business as usual and not personal. When the separation is violated you can have engineers doing shoddy work because they’re stressed or emotionally overloaded. Early in my career I was in that situation and made some very pointed comments that the company’s CEO had to smooth over.

If you do a really good job at handling the communication separation the business relationship is stronger after and each side better understands one another’s needs and motivations. My foot in mouth moment ended up turning into a larger business arrangement because the CEO turned it into a positive experience.

While not a universally perfect negotiating book, I’ve found “Never Split the Difference” to be an interesting tome on making the best of adversarial business situations.

NStD is something everyone in the business world (or who aspires to be) should read.

The fact that much of what we say, especially in times of stress, isn't what we really care about is easy to miss in actual practice.

That job actually sounds like a lot of fun. Thank you for tip on Never Split the Difference.

Point. It'd be a bit aggressive to fly trained German Shepherds in with the engineers.

> I understand that Microsoft has a similar crew they can dispatch to any customer to get their business software working again.

Yikes well I work for a large corporation that uses tons of Microsoft software, and we use their dispatch team constantly. Granted, we are probably one of their largest customers. It's great to have such a resource. But the fact that we need it doesn't speak well for Microsoft -- I would prefer if we didn't need such a dispatch team on a constant basis.

The fact that most people don't need to call said team might say more?

What, that they are used to failures, expect them, and live with them?

Before Microsoft, computers crashing was not considered an ordinary, everyday occurrence. I still recall my shock, back in the '90s, when I remarked to a Windows user that Unix didn't crash all the time, and he remarked that he went months without reinstalling. I learned that "crash" had been redefined!

Microsoft really needs that emergency crew. What says more is that most people who call them don't need to call other crews.

Well put. I think that with Microsoft products (at least for us) it's assumed that we will experience crashes, bugs, data loss, etc. At work we are all Microsoft (bringing in your own hardware is not permitted anyway). At home, I'm mostly macOS and Linux. While those aren't perfect either, I do not expect issues, whereas with Microsoft products I've simply learned to expect them.

Many people who worked on UNIX for years had plenty of experience with the kernel dumping core. I ran LINUX in the mid-90s and it wasn't extremely stable.

I ran Linux, too, starting from Slackware on a CD, graduating to Debian.

I don't know about your experience, but in my circles there was real tension between upgrading to a current kernel release, vs. maintaining your 180+ days uptime. I "apt dist-upgrade"-ed for well over a decade without a failure, through a half-dozen generations of host hardware.

Only during the period when the i915 display driver was still buggy did I ever have failures. Even then, I could SSH in.

So, compared to needing to reboot twice a day (common) or twice a week (lucky), and never once needing to reinstall, yes, it was extremely stable.

"Prodigious Rate" -- To put this in context, the latest numbers I saw is about $125 per min of unscheduled delay. It also doesn't take that many delays to wipe profitability to zero.

A corollary is that airline operations revolve around maximizing the amount of time their airplanes are flying and loaded to the gills with payload.

The word "payload" is not a misnomer :-)

Southwest had a really memorable slogan: “wheels up” and the business really rallied around that priority ruthlessly for many years. It was pretty cool and gets used in business analysis as an example a lot about how to achieve big goals.

One such (very lightweight) analysis: https://www.cnbc.com/id/43768488

It really is a great systems thinking story. Set the overall context and goal and then figure out how to optimize for the thing that drives results.

The How I Built This podcast on Southwest [0] with Kelleher (since deceased) is an amazing episode. Both for trivia and giving context to what it takes to be successful behind the scenes.

Kelleher (a lawyer by training) ran a private practice while litigating a 3-year lawsuit against airline incumbents at the time... before Southwest flew its first flight in Texas.

And when asked "Why?" As in, why didn't you stop, return to law, or do something easier, he basically said "Because it didn't seem fair. Or right. That they could keep us from flying."

I'm sure he had his fair share of sharp business decisions, but he came across as a truly great human being.

[0] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-public-radio/how-i...

A plane sitting on the ground costs revenue.

The highest revenue per hour route is JFK to Heathrow at $24,639 [1]. A 787-800 costs about $8000/hr [2]. So that's about $277/min of revenue. Yeah, $125/min sounds about right for an average route.

[1] https://www.planestats.com/bhsw_2014sep

[2] https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1398091

Well, expected revenue looks a bit difference when you're leveraged to the hilt and have interest payments scheduled.

My understanding is that very few airlines outright own their planes.

It varies. Some airlines are printing money like it’s their job and have very savvy purchasing teams. Large piles of cash spent on second hand aircraft can really help soften the blow when times get tough. Although in the current market some are even spending cash on NEW airframes which is really kind of crazy.

But speaking globally, I would say you’re likely right. The majority of airlines are very heavily leveraged and as soon as the economy softens we’ll see at least a few casualties again.

Even if they own the planes outright, the interest cost of the airplanes remains the same (because the money tied up in the airplane could be otherwise put to use earning interest).

For example, conventional wisdom is that owning your own home outright is a Good Thing. But if mortgage interest rates are low, taking out a mortgage and investing in something that pays more than that interest rate is a Better Thing.

> But if mortgage interest rates are low, taking out a mortgage and investing in something that pays more than that interest rate is a Better Thing.

Yes, but there's extra risk that way. That strategy depends on either the investment returning enough every month to pay the mortgage for that month, or another funding source (like a salary) being available every month to do so. If for some reason neither are available on a given month, you risk losing your home.

There's an episode of "World's Toughest Fixes" that follows an AOG team during the replacement of a 767 pressure dome.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Worlds+Toughest+Fixes+S01+E0...

Probably the same incident:https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/airliner-repair-247...

"Naturally, they were the best mechanics Boeing had."

I know people who do this kind of work, but are they really the best? - As long you hold a screwdriver in your hand, you are No.2 in salary. - Family, your child has birthday, something to show you in school or sport? Forget it, 5 minutes before it starts, you get always a call. So you have no family (anymore). - 9 to 5 nah.. more like 9 plus 5 hours to work a day. - Friends, forget it you don't have any. But of course they have storys to tell. But why would you choose a such life?

Because some people will always want to be the best.

And one of the more difficult things when you're that sort of person is finding a rewarding challenge up to your skills.

Or as a president once quipped, "Why does Rice play Texas?"

Because it is hard.

Exactly right. It's no fun getting the easy jobs. It's very sweet getting something done that everyone else said couldn't be done.

It's not about getting an easy or hard job. I talked about the social life.

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