Silent Information

The above is an item of interest to some engineers, those who have opted out of wearing horse blinkers in their professional lives.  I am one. Yet, suprisingly, I am a civil engineer with specialty in structural engineering, but am interested in anything technical. Hence this post.

The news item says that an aircraft of a national airline returned to its departure point safely, with no injuries. That is good news. After all, who wants a transport tragedy so soon after another (Kanchenjunga Express, Indian Railways) in the transport sector?

But I have digressed.

From the photograph accompanying the 1½ column-inch item, we cannot identify the plane (Airbus or Boeing), and more relevantly who made the engine – Pratt and Whitney, or GE Aerospace, or Rolls-Royce or some other major player in the market.

This is the silence implied in the title. So, you ask, what did that information as enumerated above – the list of gas turbine fan manufacturers – tells us.

After the spate of failures or near disasters (the typical media announce these as near misses, which is a misnomer that implies not that two aircrafts  missed each other in close encounters but actually collided (recall the movie title “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”,)  in recent times – say, over the past decade and a half – must have undermined the confidence of air travellers – it is, in sales term, a death penalty for the industry.

While Boeing is the “chosen company” (similar to what God revealed to Moses who His "chosen people" are) for failures, others have been just lucky not to have been “chosen”. So, when God directed His ire at Boeing, the others hid under the rocks.

Now, Boeing may or may not have been involved in making the current failed engines and one of the others must have been the culprit. The strategy is for that company to suppress the information – who actually manufactured, albeit probably in parts – the impugned engine.

So, what have we learned? That sales team, aided and abetted by senior management , have the technical team by the latter’s throat!

“Sales” is the market mantra!

Raghuram Ekambaram