Boeing blamed the delivery delay on continuing problems with flight control software, being produced by Honeywell International, and integrating other systems on the plane, which it did not detail.Bolts? Boeing has run out of bolts? That's positively Soviet. Call GOSPLAN and get a brigade of shock workers on the bolts right now! There's probably one huge bolt on a low loader in the yard at Boeing Field... Snark aside...actually, fuck putting the snark aside. Let's get the snark out of the shed and give it a damn good snarking. There's something about the Reuters report that makes me think the software actually uses bolts; it's made in Seattle, after all.
It said it now expects the first test flight of the 787 to take place "around the end of the first quarter" next year, suggesting it could be as late as March or even April 2008.
That is a drastic extension to its original plan to start airborne tests in August 2007. In early September, Boeing scheduled the first test flight for mid-November to mid-December as it wrestled with software problems and a shortage of bolts.
I suppose they called it the Dreamliner because unlike the A380 it's, well, still a dream.
6 comments:
At BAE, they call it the Binliner...
Surprised it needs bolts at all.
I wonder if the bolts are an intermediate good unique to the 787. If so, Rothbard's application of the calculation argument to the corporation might be relevant. He argued that when vertical integration reached the point where there was no external market for some production inputs, the corporation operated in calculational chaos in regard to that input. And John Menge (in "The Backward Art of Interdivisional Transfer Pricing") showed that in the average manufacturing corporation, a majority of intermediate goods are product-specific and not avaiable in the outside market. For such intermediate goods, transfer pricing operated on essentially the same basis as the Soviet planned economy: a wild guesstimate based on the value of more basic inputs in outside markets, with a generous helping of cost-plus markup.
This doesn't even touch on other forms of information filtering and opportunism in a hierarchy. You put them all together, and it's pretty hard to distinguish a corporate-planned economy from a state-planned one. Except, of course, the Soviet politicians defended the bureaucratic oligarchy as "socialist," while Western politicians defend it as "our free enterprise system."
So pretty much all software developed for strictly internal use would count as intermediate goods, right? Sounds plausible.
Spot on Duane - who else is going to do it once supplier #1's shit hits the fan, and who are they going to employ other than #1s team?
Sounds like another example of "just-in-time" inventory management striking again. While it is much more cost-effective to only have parts for manufacture when you need them, stocking nothing yourself, lowering your numbers for works-in-process; this does not factor in any kind of risk that 1. your supplier may not be able to make-good on the order because he is using the same type of stupid system. Something tells me it more costly to delay the manufacture of end-products rather than stock enough inventory to be able to meet production deadlines. Stupid accountants.
Post a Comment