OT - Being 787 issues, does this mean carbon composite has issues?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org>

| It's also my belief that the underlying politics of the manufacture --
| that call for major component plants and jobs scattered all over the
| world --

You are surely right about the politics.  For example, all sorts of
Canadian contract call for "industrial offsets".  Part of this plane
is made in Toronto, possibly for this reason.

The Japanese government seems to have financed a lot of the 787
program, conditional on large Japanese component.

Maybe projects like this are so big that a single company cannot
sanely make the gamble.  In the past, US aerospace companies were
effectively subsidized by military contracts.

The whole US domination of passenger aircraft manufacture was at least
partially an accidental effect of WWII.  As I understand it, the
division of labour amongst had the UK building more fighters than
bombers by the end of the war.  Bombers were a better base for airline
manufacture.

Canada produced the second passenger jet plane, the Avro Jetliner.
Apparently a good one.  (The first passenger jet plane, the de
Haviland Comet, is famous for falling out of the sky due to metal
fatigue.)  The Canadian Government forced Avro to drop the Jetliner to
concentrate on military production (CF100?  I don't remember), 

| has made the process of completing the final assembly to be
| orders of magnitude more difficult than if more of the work was done in
| Washington State.

We old fogies always think that the old ways were better.  These new
systems are probably so much more complicated and intricate that the
old ways can no longer be applied.

| IMO, until proven otherwise, this is a supply chain fsckup at least as
| much as anything attributable to the composition of the materials.

We'll never know.  We'll be told a bunch of myths, official and
unofficial, and have no way of knowing which is right.

If the new production methods allowed for everything to be
second-sourced, that would increase reliability and predictability of
the supply chain.  But redundancy costs and nobody is buying it.
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