TL;DR: I'm just not buying the "alternate history" as something that is even plausible. Maybe that's what I should infer by the use of the words "alternate history", but to me the scenario is more along the line of an impossible fantasy rather than a plausible alternative.
lightsaber wrote:So perhaps 250 more A380s. Enough to make a profit? Not so likely. But enough for a NEO.
Basically you're saying if a long list of things went in favor of the A380 program it might be in production till (let's say) mid 2020s but not really making any money for Airbus or its partners. It seems that ending the program later in this decade or early in the 2020s is a better outcome for Airbus as a company.
The GP angle is intriguing since both FX and 5X had chosen the GP engine. Clearly that would have driven up the volume for that engine, but to me that doesn't mean the volume would have been big enough to get the partners to invest in major PIPs such as the one that would require a new case to be built for the turbine. By the time such decisions needed to be made GE had won exclusivity on the 777W/L and making a stronger business case for the A389 would have meant making a weaker business case for the 77W. In the end, both 5X and FX ended up shifting their purchases to platforms where GE90 was the only option (777F, 748F). We know that once GE had the 77W monopoly, they were very protective of it. That's why they were on the A350 Mk I but were not on the A350-XWB: the later was too much of a threat to its GE90 monopoly. So, all in all, I think there was a point in time where GE would have not supported any technological advancement of the GP engine, even if they had managed to get FX and 5X as customers.
lightsaber wrote:But eh, the plane entered 6 tons overweight which was 4 to 6 tons of management margin. The
wrong circle diameter added tons to the tail and tons around every wire access port. It screwed up the nose too. Drawing circles or ellipses accurately is critical in designing a plane.
The Catia 4/5 error is a bigger disaster than Airbus let on. It's amazing how much you learn buying a pitcher of beer for your contract stress, design, and aero engineers. I had the privilege of befriending one of the top Aerospace stress engineers. He was hired to fix a lot. I cry when I think of how many IQ points his stroke cost him.
There wouldn't have been some solutions without him.
Ahh it's that Sunday morning when reading a few words on a.net sends me off to google which leads me back into a world of old a.net posts, some a decade or more older. Seems a.net has cornered the market on this obscure topic since most google results lead us back to our discussions here.
My research eventually led me back to a relatively recent discussion at
viewtopic.php?t=1355693&start=450#p19389551 which points to
http://calleam.com/WTPF/?p=4700 which says:
In part the problem was the CATIA version 5 was not a simple evolution from version 4, it was a complete rewrite. Reports indicate that the calculations used to establish bend radii for wires as they wove through the airframe were inconsistent across the different versions of the software and that inconsistency resulted in the problem.
I think this "inconsistent" calculation that resulted when CATIA V4 was rewritten as CATIA V5 is quite possibly the same problem as the "wrong circle diameter" problem, but I'd love to know more.
As for the "alternate history" topic, I think
viewtopic.php?t=770047#p11110273 is from someone who clearly is an Airbus insider and is relevant:
airmagnac wrote:The main thing to remember is that the
Airbus building the A380 was fundamentally different to the Airbus that starting designing it. Since 2001, Airbus is a single company, and that's how we all see it. But
before 2001, "Airbus" was a loose association of several state-sponsored national aerospace champions, each working for their own interests within the frame of a French legal entity called "Groupement d'Interet Economique".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupem... ... 9conomiqueEach of these separate companies forming Airbus had their own processes and tools : requirements tools, design tools, simulation tools, testing tools, IT equipment (simple example : for the OS, use Windows or Linux ?), etc...
For wirings, I'm guessing you would need a tool chain looking like :
- tool(s) for requirement (like DOORS)
- tool(s) to functionally design the equipment (like the old SAO, or now SCADE, used to design Airbus flight control systems)
- tool(s) to physically design the equipment (that would be CATIA or similar)
- tool(s) to functionally design the wiring between said-equipment, and all the associated connectors, relays etc...
- tool(s) to physically design the wiring
- tool(s) to test the designs
- tool(s) to test the produced harness
- tool(s) to test the entire system equipment + wiring
- tool(s) to manage the configuration of all components
- tool(s) to manage change requests from all the stakeholders
- tool(s) for PLM to oversee all of the above
and that's just the parts I can think of off the top of my head. You always have several choices for each tool, so
each company would have its own tool chains and usage practices to suit it's own needs and interests. And the resulting processes & tool chains are not things you can change overnight. Especially if there are also
national & cultural aspects involved, as there were (and are) here.
The whole thread makes for fascinating reading if you're in to the history of technology in general and this specific issue in particular, like I am. It goes through the assortment of tools used to get the A380 designed and manufactured, along with many of the reasons why it was hard for AIrbus to get to a unified set of tools for A380 and future programs.
viewtopic.php?t=433245#p5749899 is from 11 years ago and highlights the "cultural" organizational issues at the time the A380 was being designed:
Rheinbote wrote:There are some misconceptions here. First of all, the A380 is NOT 100% digitally designed. AFAIK, the wiring is NOT done in CATIA v4, but in a legacy stand-alone 2D tool in Hamburg versus a 3D plugin to CATIA v5 at Toulouse.
This is NOT due to the fact the German engineers ignorantly 'balked' at CATIA v5 or 3D plug-in tools. It is more complex. In Airbus, he who has a 'tool', usually meaning an in-house developed piece of software, has the right to claim competence and authority for the process covered by the software tool. Software tools are a means of gaining, maintaining and excerting power in Airbus. Hence whenever a non-French department is adopting a French tool, they loose part of their competence and authority. So they HAVE to balk to avoid being marginalized. A lot of useful and sophisticated tools where starved for the purpose of shifting competence and power to Tolouse.
The power struggle almost paralyzed the evolution of software tools and, even worse, the evolution of engineering culture to make best use of new tools and processes ever since the early/mid 1990s. Fortunately, there are bright people everywhere in Airbus - be it France, UK, Germany, or Spain - who manage to create islands of state-of-the-art digital design in spite of obstacles being thrown up by middle/upper management and unions who are largely occupied with preserving their power (or should I say department headcount?) and hardly ever waste a thought on enterprise objectives.
These posts suggest to me that righting the A380 program was more about getting past the organizational hurdles rather than the technological ones. The technological ones were recognized early on. The organizational hurdles meant that the only way the technological problems would be solved was if there was no other alternative. The A380 debacle created that situation, and the problems were solved, but to me there's no "alternative history" where a solution would have happened more smoothly.
