Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

I really wish people would stop speculating about the 787s problems. Yes, it has had serious issues. But why is the author qualified to talk about them? From his bio, it's not clear that he has any aviation experience, and he doesn't appear to have any inside sources.

The article is littered with phrases like "My hypothesis is that McDonnell's mindset from its defense work — minimizing the amount of capital put at risk during R&D — was applied to the 787" and "But, in this instance, it wasn't so much the outsourcing, as it was the decision to modularize a complicated problem too soon". How can the author make such brazen claims without having talked to a Boeing engineer or visited the factory? I assume if he had done either, he would have noted it in the article.

Only one type of person is qualified to comment on the problems: a person working at Boeing, or someone talking to him/her. Otherwise, we're just playing the Apple rumor game, piecing together tidbits of supply chain data to come up with the conclusion we want to hear.

Do you know what the word 'hypothesis' means? Its a theory, something to be tested - its no fact, no statement of truth, just pure conjecture that something has gone wrong with the Boeing group.

You don't get this far into the 787 project, to be defeated by a faulty battery design, unless something is seriously wrong with the engineering processes. Unless management, senior to engineering in the grand scheme of things, has screwed up somewhere. This much is clear.

That the battery catches fire in an operational plane -i.e. its no longer in the test phases, but actually certified and operational - yet none of the billion-dollar Boeing process caught this issue beforehand - is of EXTREME INTEREST to the tech community, and in that context there is absolutely no reason why the issue shouldn't be discussed, openly, as such.

Look: Someone really, really screwed up. Its a Billion-Dollar project, being crippled by a fundamental design flaw - this proves the value of the circumstances to the tech community, for which the motivation for discussing this incident is, mostly, derived from an interest in the process failure.

That the battery is flawed somehow, that the fuel control system is flawed, somehow, that the fire suppression systems don't work so great - this is not so great news, perhaps, technologically, unless we have access to the real data: but that the Process by which Boeing produced a crap expensive product, in spite of billions of dollars of investment, IS very interesting news.

Remember when Toshiba recalled a ton of their laptops for problems with the lithium batteries? They had tens if not hundreds of thousands of those batteries deployed before the problem became evident.

The Boeing batteries are significantly more expensive and higher capacity than laptop batteries which results in longer and more complicated testing procedures. Not to mention needing to test the many various load conditions on the battery. At the end of the day, there is only so much you can do to test a technology before deploying it. There is a chance that Boeing, it's contractors, or manufacturers were negligent in their testing especially after the initial delays of a $32 BILLION program. However, I'm guessing the battery problem is the result of standards not fully prepared to test the battery technology.

I'd like to add a second type of persons having certified its airworthiness and as a third type everybody else wondering whether the tons of flying metal labeled aircraft will stay over their head.

it's a bit of a gray line - it's being published on HBR which is a "Big Name Publication" to a certain extent. that being said, it IS a blog, and blogs are for random musings such as this...

"Big Name Publications" do not get a free pass for speculation, in print or in blog. They gain credibility, so they can say things like "From talking to senior Boeing engineers, we uncovered..." but making up hypotheses out of thin air is shoddy journalism that should be criticized, regardless of the source.

When I read enough poor quality articles from a publication, I never read anything from that publication again. I haven't read HBR in about 4 years.

I did talk to people at Boeing. (And yes, I'm the article's author).

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