Air Chance

Air Chance

Boeing in Seattle and Airbus in Toulouse decided to construct jointly a new airplane in Brazil.

Boeing has the construction instructions for the BBB

Airbus has the construction instructions for the AAA

A team is sent to Brazil, to construct the BraPlane.

Boeing makes a photocopy of its Assembly Manual and sends it to Brazil.

Watsing finds it really a bore to photocopy 40.000 pages of instructions, but he is a simple worker, he has no other function so he takes the Assembly Manual, sets himself in front of the photocopying machine and starts the duplication job.

It is one of these old photocopying machines, you have to put the original on the screen, then push the green button, then wait for the photocopy to come out, take it out of the machine and to put it in the stack.

In the beginning it is not a very difficult job even if it is quite boring, but as time is passing, the photocopier starts misbehaving, some of the photocopies are unreadable, some are blocked inside the machine, Watsing has to call maintenance, they come, they open the copier, they take out the rolled dirty copy, they throw it away, then Watsing goes on with the job, totally forgetting the discarded copy.

At times Watsing puts a bit of order in the stack of copied documents, it is a very poor, wet, warm, dark working place, when Watsing reorders the stack of photocopies, some are displaced.

At the same time Monsieur Crique is doing a similar job in Toulouse. The working conditions are not better than in Seattle, the photocopier if anything is even worse, and to make things worse, Monsieur Crique has strong doubts about the total fidelity of his wife, so his thoughts have a tendency to wander far away from the job at hand. But why should Mr Crique worry about a plane to be built in Brazil, he has really other far more important things to worry about.

Finally the whole Production Document is photocopied in Seattle, nobody had the time or the wish to check that the 40.000 pages of instructions are complete and without errors, the whole thing is put into a case and sent to Brazil.

In Toulouse, a strike is being announced, so that M. Crique feels that the faster he gets rid of the job, the better it will be for him, certainly if he can come home at 6 p.m. instead of 7 p.m. he would certainly feel better, even if Madame Crique possibly will not feel better. So who is going to find out that 40.000 pages of instructions have become 37.000 pages and anyway, those people over there, do they read French at all?

The packages leave Seattle and Toulouse for Brazil, but you know transporters are not what they used to be, the cartons are thrown here and there, sometimes they are lift outside even when it is raining.

The Assembly Team is waiting impatiently in Brazil; Both instructions manuals are received and the engineers can start drawing the BraPlane.

How many engines ?

The Boeing instructions day 4 jets.

The Airbus instructions say 2 jets.

What should the BraPlane engineers do? A three engine plane, or choose betseen two jets and 4 jets?

As for the colour of the plane the Airbus instructions state that it should be red and blue while the BOeing instructions state that it should be White, so the engineers, having a lot of white paint decide that it will be better to paint it white.

Sometimes, things go a bit wrong, they should have used aluminum for the tail part, but having no aluminium handy, they used bambou.

Some smart engineers, you always have some smart chaps on the Assembly line, remark that it is a bit strange that the landing gear is placed at the tail and not in the middle of the plane under the wing. But what can you do when you are employed to built a plane, some instructions say nothing about landing gears, others are unreadable, so you do your best.

Others, but they keep quite about it, find it a bit awkward that the right wing is long and thin while the left wing is strong and short.

So, Nature has made a new Creation, the BraPlane.

he most important part of the BraPlane was the installation of the automatic pilot. It was just a box they received together with the Instructions Sheets, nobody knew how it worked and what one should do if it would not work.

The BraPlane will do its maiden flight in nine months time. If it crashes, nobody will really care, who cares about another plane more or another plane less;

But who was going to test and demonstrate how to use that new BraPlane? Nobody has ever flown such a strange object, yet it is expected to get in the air and not to crash.

If it's maiden flight is a success, if the test program proves that it can fly, if the market finds a niche for it, if it can survive faulty maintenance, missing part part, misuse by the staff, then it will fly and become famous, until the day it will join other planes in the airplane graveyard in Tucson.

As it grow old, the BraPlane gets more and more incompetent crew members, they are so incompetent that they simply connect the Automatic Pilot and leave the plane to itself. Why the automatic pilot is called ALZ, nobody knows, maybe it is a remembrance of H.A.L.?

A new plane is born.

Questions:

Who decided that a plane should be built?

Why are Watsing and Crique not properly supervised?

Why is nobody checking that the Construction Instructions are accurate?

Who is controlling the Assembly Engineers and workers? Who is responsible for getting rid of a drunk or drugged worker?

What is the purpose of building a BraPlane?

Is it supposed to replace the Boeing BBB and the Aribus AAA?

How with such an incredibly inefficient system is it possible to create a viable human being?

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