The Airplane - Jay Spenser [130]
Many other trends are likewise transforming collaboration. One is ongoing technology integration, which is blurring the boundaries between formerly discrete devices. The cell phone offers capabilities including e-mail, Web browsing, instant messaging, and features such as a personal calendar, calculator, alarm clock, camera, verbal memo recorder, and so on. Some are so capable at other tasks that they are viewed primarily as personal digital assistants, with telephony as just one function.
The same is true of formerly discrete fields of activity, where technology integration is blurring the lines between formerly distinct job functions. Keeping all this straight makes for organizational challenges and requires flexible teaming that calls on skills as needed.
This ongoing integration of technologies lets engineers create highly complex systems of systems in which individual capabilities are knit seamlessly into a whole of vastly greater overall capability. The coming air traffic management environment provides an example of the potential scope of system-of-systems engineering projects.
The designs of the latest jetliners and military aircraft likewise reap the benefits of technology integration. They are aerial platforms whose performance capabilities are defined not just by airframe efficiency, aerodynamics, and engines but also by electronic sophistication. This is particularly true of fly-by-wire aircraft.
Much like your multitasking cell phone, modern airplanes rely on shared and distributed functionalities rather than the discrete systems of aviation’s earlier days. This makes them more capable, reliable, redundant, and robust. They have in effect become flying data networks whose distributed avionics and other systems interconnect via digital data bases using Internet-type protocols.
As for aerospace engineering itself, its many constituent fields (aerodynamics, structures, electrical systems, payload, flight deck, landing gear, and so on) have advanced tremendously over time. More than just possessing greater knowledge, these disciplines also have vastly better tools and processes. Whatever the task—program planning, systems and component design, risk identification and mitigation, and so on—human ingenuity and collective effort have devised better ways of accomplishing it.
Engineers care enormously about definitions, standards, and baselines. They have to be sure they’re talking about the same things, so terminology is carefully agreed upon and ambiguity is banished. Engineers also like to know they’re using compatible tools and processes and that they’re working with the same data sets and document iterations.
Technology and human inventiveness continue to transform every bit of aviation activity from one end of the field to the other. For example, engineers used to create airplanes by working toward periodic updates of an evolving design. Unfortunately, what one engineer or group did in building further on that baseline release often conflicted with what others did elsewhere, an undesirable situation that wouldn’t necessarily be known until too late, when changes were either too expensive or impossible. The result was a suboptimal design people had to live with. Today, in contrast, computerized design databases update immediately, so engineers always see the latest baseline, reducing errors and rework.
Airplanes are today defined by teams that bring together not just the people who will create the design but also those who will manufacture it and those who will operate and maintain it in service. Pioneered by Boeing with its 777 program, this design-build-support team concept ensures full attention to every aspect of the design. It makes for a better-thought-out airplane that is more user-friendly.
Greater cost and performance visibility is another beneficial trend in aerospace. Because products such as commercial jetliners cost billions of dollars to develop, it is imperative to make decisions that manage program resources wisely and deliver the right product. Only the availability