Totally. Meanwhile China throws caution to the wind and innovates like we used to.
The most important line of this article doesn't even pertain to aviation directly:
> Some perspective: In 1957, the U.S. hadn’t even launched a satellite. Twelve years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. So unleaded avgas is a harder problem than a lunar landing? Perhaps you can enlighten me in the comments section.
It's happening everywhere, all industries. This infatuation with impeding progress in the name of organizational justification, budget numbers, or whatever - it'll be the death of us if we don't get it under control.
>> Meanwhile China throws caution to the wind and innovates like we used to.
Not in aviation they don't. Why? Because there are two certification bodies, FAA and EASA. Anyone who wants to fly anything in the world has to certify his tech with those two (unless it is used purely domestic, but than it can hardly be called aerospace or aviation). That includes Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, European and North / South American manufacturers.
The reason why certification standards are what they are is safety. Aviation became one of the safest industries for a reason. The 737 MAX debacle showed pretty well what happens when those standards are not adhered to. Is it a slow process? Sure it is, but it is what it is for very valid reasons.
ICAO is the certifying authority, FAA and EASA (and hundreds of other national certification bodies) have agreements that allow for the certification results done on the national level to be accepted by ICAO. I totally agree about the significance of strict standards.
There's a whole lot of conservatism driving it. I'm not talking about the political ideology, I'm talking about the basic idea of conserving the same way of doing things "because that's what we've always done" or "it was good enough for our grandparents" or "why change what isn't broken"
None of these things are good excuses to keep beating the same dead horse, that's not how progress is made. I also know that changing too many things at once can lead to issues so I'm not advocating for upending everything at once, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't start changing what needs to be changed.
Perhaps this is just my perspective and we may not agree where that start lies.
This conservatism of which you speak is just risk intolerance, or less charitably, an unwillingness to accept responsibility. We're stuck with old processes, byzantine committe review for simple things, expensive PE stamped drawings for a storm drain, all because nobody is willing to give it a try and be responsible for the result. And we actively crap on anyone who does want to give it a try as being reckless.
Risk intolerance, diffusion of responsibly, things like that as an abstract concepts tends to thunderous applause around here. So maybe a mirror would help us solve the problem.
I've always been curious about what the bureaucracy is actually doing that takes all this time. I would love to see an hour-by-hour breakdown. When my county says I need a permit to install a water heater or whatever, and that permit (a piece of paper, just to remind everyone) is going to take 6 months to make, I would LOVE to have a full work breakdown showing why this takes 6 months. What people are doing what actions at what times, where the critical path of typing this piece of paper ends in 6 months? I would love to know why it takes decades to build 5 miles of train tracks. What people are doing what actual activities in what order that adds up to 10+ years?
When the execs at your software company asks you to explain a 3 week estimate to build a feature, you can sit down with your project manager, and build a GANNT chart or whatever, showing engineer A and engineer B doing design work for 1 week, implementation for another week, and testing the third week. In more detail, you could break down every team member's time spent by the hour actually writing docs, typing in code, waiting for it to compile, organizing field testing, and so on, and you can show exactly what physical activities result in the 3 week estimate.
I suspect if government agencies (or big companies) were required to produce an hour-by-hour breakdown of what individual people physically did through a project, you'd see a lot of "blocked on other team A finishing project B" or "waiting for executive Y to sign document Z" and also a lot of "picking my nose or playing golf, not doing my job."
bias toward short term risk avoidance versus long term risk avoidance. (hence status quo bias, also "nobody got fired for buying IBM", etc.)
what's needed is a meta-level risk budget and sane risk management, and in case of conservative industries (medicine, aviation, nuclear, blablabla) there should be a calculated and constant push to bias against stagnation, without fucking up the otherwise great safety record.
(of course this usually means a bit more in costs of managing changes, but that should be looked at in the perspective of opportunity costs of not changing to better processes/technology/structure/etc.)
>> Some perspective: In 1957, the U.S. hadn’t even launched a satellite. Twelve years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. So unleaded avgas is a harder problem than a lunar landing? Perhaps you can enlighten me in the comments section.
The Apollo program also cost $25.8 billion between 1960 and 1973, or approx. $257 billion adjusted for inflation in 2020[1]. That's a full 5% of total government spending. That's an astronomical! amount of money to spend on a seemingly frivolous goal of upstaging the Spviet Union.
The most important line of this article doesn't even pertain to aviation directly:
> Some perspective: In 1957, the U.S. hadn’t even launched a satellite. Twelve years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. So unleaded avgas is a harder problem than a lunar landing? Perhaps you can enlighten me in the comments section.
It's happening everywhere, all industries. This infatuation with impeding progress in the name of organizational justification, budget numbers, or whatever - it'll be the death of us if we don't get it under control.