Michael Crichton’s Airframe is set on the backdrop of an aerospace manufacturing company, Norton Aircraft. The book opens with an accident on TransPacific Airlines flight 545, a Norton N-22 passenger plane manufactured in part by the company. The accident occurs above American Airspace, forcing the Aircraft (en route from Hong Kong to Denver) to make an unscheduled landing, after the accident which is described by the pilot as “severe turbulence”, leaves four dead and fifty-six passengers injured. The incident in question is based on a similar 1993 accident aboard a McDonnell-Douglas MD-11, also a widebody aircraft, like the N-22.
The rest of the plot
is seen
largely from the perspective of a Norton employee, Casey Singleton, who
attempts to unravel the cause of the in-flight incident. The plot takes
place
largely in the Norton office, at Glandale, California, in 1996. Casey
Singleton
is a 36-year-old vice-president for quality assurance at Norton
Aircraft. Her
job profile is defined by her identity badge - QA/IRT - which stands
for
Quality Assurance representative on the Incident Review Team. The
investigation
and its urgency are set on the backdrop of an impending deal with the
Chinese
regarding sales of the N-22 plane – an $8 billion deal for the possible
sale of
50 N-22s which could make or break the company. Other parts of the plot
include
a media investigation by the crew of Newsline (the American equivalent
of
Channel Seven expose), problems with the local blue-collar unions who
believe
that their jobs will be exported overseas and intense office politics.
The accident is soon discovered to have occurred most probably because of an “uncommanded slats deployment”. Wing slats are retractable parts that extend during take-off and landing, increasing the lift and stability of the airplane by augmenting the wing. During cruise speed, is the slats are extended, the plane may lose stability momentarily, though the autopilot would typically correct this immediately, and sensors would warn the pilot of the uncommanded deployment.
The possible causes attributed to the accident include cockpit design flaw, pilot error, mechanical glitch, and fake sub-components found on the plane. The actual cause of the accident as discovered by Casey Singleton is (as is typical of Aircraft accidents) not attributable to any singular cause but to a series of unforeseen circumstances, which to describe here serves little purpose as it is not pertinent to the Operations Management analysis of the book, and would only serve to be a ‘spoiler’ robbing the potential reader’s pleasure of one of Crichton’s masterpieces.
As the author
describes it,
“Airframe is based on a true story-actually, several true stories.
There are,
of course, a number of famous episodes of deadly turbulence, as well as
several
instances in which pilots have allowed other people to fly the plane. I
used
the National Transport Safety Board reports on these real incidents as
the
basis of the story.
MD-11 (Passenger carrier)
Passengers - (1 class) 410)
Max. takeoff weight 602,555 lb (273,314 kg)
Max range 6,821 nm (12,633 km)
Max cruising speed 945 km/h (510 kt)
Length 61.21 m (200 ft 10 in)
Wingspan 51.66 m (169 ft 6 in)
Tail height 17.60 m (57 ft 9 in)
(Nt – Details not
available on the book have been based on the aircraft specs of the
McDonnell
Douglas MD-11, the aircraft on which, by the author’s admission, the
book is
based)
The
typical commercial
aircraft is described as the most complex manufactured product in the
world.
With over one million parts, it is manufactured on an assembly line and
could
be made-to-order or in some cases even made-to-stock.
The assembly line details are as under –
Time-to-manufacture – 75 days
Man-hours required – 480,000
(2 shifts X 8 hours per shift X avg. workers per
shift 4000
X 75 days / 10 stations)
Operating life – 20 years
Average use-per year – 5000 hours
Total operating life (in hours) – 100,000 hours
(20 X 5000)
Over the last two
years, the
moving line technology (originally conceived by Henry Ford and used in
the
manufacture of the Model t as early as 1913), or at least an adaptation
of it,
has been deemed to be the future of aircraft manufacture. While this is
still
in the preliminary stages and is being used on select basis by
manufacturers
like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, it has considerable implications for
aircraft
manufacturers. The first-ever continuous moving assembly line for
producing
fighter jets was initiated by engineers at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics
Co. in
the production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in January 2004. Boeing
has
been using the moving line to produce 747s since 2001.
Moving-line
technology seems to
be the future of aircraft manufacture in as much as it promises to
increase
production efficiency, reduce floor space and reduce costs
substantially. At
the same time, it also optimises production flow and processes, and
reduces
flow time. Boeing has reduced flow time from 24 to 18 days on the 747.
Accidents
rarely
result from a single cause but typically from a combination of
unforeseen
events such as a technical glitch which a flight crew member responds
to
incorrectly. As in the book, this makes prevention seemingly difficult
as one
would have to predict innumerable combinations of event sequences which
could
possibly cause accidents, and the element of human error is volatile as
it
depends largely on psychological rather than predictable empirical
evidence.
However, this also gives the manufacturer multiple opportunities to
prevent
them. By removing any of the possible events in the sequence, the link
in the
chain can be broken and the accident avoided.
Thus the
analysis of incidents in airplanes becomes imperative from the
point-of-view of
preventing future occurrences of similar nature. The "intervention
strategies" for include new training aids for flight crews and
mechanics,
new operating procedures, infrastructure improvements, aircraft design
modifications, and incorporation of new technologies into the aviation
system.
A typical
Aircraft accident precedes the following characteristics steps –
1.
If near the airport, the airport operator handles
organizes
for the fire-fighting, rescue operations and arranges for medical
facilities.
2.
If distant from the airport, the above functions
are handled
by local authorities, who have the additional responsibility of ‘search
and
rescue’ and the securing and protection of important evidence.
3.
The media covers aircraft incidents extensively,
and their
underlying causes.
4.
The airplane manufacturer and engine manufacturer
will be
involved in the accident investigation, if called upon by the airline
or
regulatory agency leading the investigation.
5.
Government authorities like the National
Transportation Safety
Board and the Federal Aviation Authority in the United States are
immediately
notified and initiate their own operations and investigations. The NTSB
team
(or its foreign equivalent) consists of one of the five members of the
board
plus staff specialists in air traffic control, aircraft maintenance,
aircraft
operations, aircraft systems and other disciplines useful to
determining an
accident's cause. In the U.S., the aircraft and engine manufacturers,
the pilot
and controller unions, and the government regulatory agency with
jurisdiction
over the accident site - also participate in the investigation. The
government
authorities lead the investigation, oversee all testing and analysis of
wreckage, and are solely responsible for determining the probable cause.
The Director
General may order the investigation of any accident involving an
aircraft and
may appoint any person (generally referred to as an "Inspector of
Accidents") or a committee of inquiry for the purpose of carrying out
such
investigation. An analysis of the reports published by the CAA reveals
that
while the investigation is usually detailed, the report is perfunctory,
consisting of flight details and a short summary listing the
contributory
factors to the accident, more often than not written simply as “Pilot –
Aircraft Handling”.
The
investigation typically makes use of the services of the National
Aerospace
Laboratories (India's premier civil R& D establishment in
aeronautics and
allied disciplines. NAL has a Failure Analysis Group which has been
investigating failures for about 30 years. The group’s clients
typically
include India's Director-General of Civil Aviation, Indian Air Force
and Navy,
Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), establishments of the Indian Space
Research
Organisation (ISRO) and India's Defence Research and Development
Organisation
(DRDO), Courts of Enquiry, India's Central Bureau of investigation
(CBI) and a
large number of industries in the private and the public sector.
“The FAA
required commercial carriers to keep extraordinarily
detailed maintenance records. Every time a part was changed out, it was
noted
in a maintenance log. In addition, the manufacturers, though not
required to,
maintained an exhaustive ship's record of every part originally on the
plane,
and who had manufactured it. All this paperwork meant that every one of
the
aircraft's one million parts could be traced back to its origin. If a
part was
swapped out and repaired, that was known. Each part on a plane had a
history of
its own. Given enough time, they could find out where this part had
come from,
who had installed it, and when.”
Remanufacturing consists of repair or
refurbishment of worn parts and products. Typical assemblies are
disassembled and
worn parts removed for repair or scrap. Remanufacturing involves
operations of
a specialist nature which are carried out in finite capacity job shop
environments. The job shop environment is most suitable to this type of
production, as customer requirements and types vary significantly, and
volumes
are typically low.
The operations rule that these shops
follow are
typically based on the critical-ratio rule, with jobs getting higher
priority
the closer they are to the date of completion. Bottlenecks occur when a
particular process resource is made intensive use of in multiple
orders, or the
demands are beyond capacity. Attempts to reach a negative critical
ratio are
avoided with the use of Enterprise Resource Planning software (such as
SAP AG’s
R/3Ò).
The components have varying recovery rates and lead teams to manufacture, and as such need to be made-to-stock as the requirements are unknown and non-deterministic. The word used in scholarly reports is ‘stochastic’, and as such is quite different, implying the possibility of using artificial intelligence stimulators to predict possible requirements based on probability theory. This makes the strategies used typically by these firms complicated and not entirely accurate, and is typically a trade-off between response time and inventory cost. Inventory costs are high as buffer stocks need to be maintained due to the unpredictability nature of the requirements. However, it has been estimated that ‘remanufacturing operations with good scheduling and control systems can achieve inventory cost savings of over 40 per cent compared to less efficient competitors’ (‘Aircraft Materials Remanufacturing System Simulation Model’ by Peter Johnson, Don Kulasiri, Richard Sedcole). The literature available on operations planning for remanufacturing is however, limited, as research is conducted on a private basis, such as by Pratt and Whitney ( who use ‘probabilities determined from historic information to anticipated cases when planning aspects of aircraft engine remanufacturing’).
While the home team of the Union at
Norton
Aircraft was averse to the export of important component parts like the
wing
and tail to foreign countries, it has been realized that aircraft
manufacture
being the labour intensive industry it is, must follow the principle of
competitive advantage. A typical Boeing 777 for instance, sources
components
from 11 different countries which come together on their assembly line
in
Everett, Washington. About 20% of the component structure comes from
the Japanese consortium of Fuji, Kawasaki, and
Mitsubishi. This export of components and sub-components benefits the
company
on multiple parameters –
1.
Risk
diversification
2.
Specialization
3.
Inclination
of the country to buy from the company as compared with competitors
Like at Norton, Boeing employees are up
in arms
against this, and protest with slogans like “Export Planes - Not Our
Jobs.” The
inevitable truth however is that new standards of global
competitiveness
enhance efficiency and product value, and givae an incentive to buyer
countries, though at the same time they make the job of the Operations
Manager
more complex and risky. The need for international operations can be
broadly
classified under the following heads –
1.
Reduced Costs – Being a labour
intensive industry, foreign locations save on labour costs, grant the
ability
to give lower skilled jobs to lower cost countries, and free higher
cost
workers to do more valuable tasks.
2.
Improve Supply
Chain – Makes use of unique resources in available countries
(labour,
expertise or raw material)
3.
Provide better
goods and services – By customising products to meet unique
cultural needs
in foreign markets and reduce response time to service requirements
abroad.
4.
Attract new markets
– Improve interaction with foreign customers, suppliers and
competitive
businesses, enhance knowledge of foreign markets. At the same time, it
increases the customer base, diversifies risk and smoothes the business
cycle.
It also expands the life cycle of products which become obsolete in the
domestic market
5.
Learn to Improve
Operations – As evident, many operations management improvisations
have
come from foreign (to the U.S.) countries like Japan, and foreign
operations
promote a freer flow of ideas, and adaptations to equipment use and
technology.
6.
Attract and Retain
Global Talent – By making use of local functional expertise, and
attracting
global talents. It also provides the opportunity to guard against
downturns in
local markets by relocation.
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