Originally Posted by
msbbarratt
The ride quality [of the A380] does matter.
Slightly off-topic, but there are other benefits too - the fact that the A380 cabin is pressurised to a lower altitude than previous jets (as is the B787) meant that a musician friend of mine who suffers from severe sleep apnoea was able to tour in Australia for the first time, as to do so on older types would have resulted in health problems.
I won't bore everyone with my rants on management incompetence again, save to say that Boeing have been having this kind of problem going back at least to the 737NG, and it will take more than a simple change in management to resolve it. EEngr's post on one of the 787 threads sums it up pretty well:
Originally Posted by
EEngr
When I was there (before the 787 program) there were two schools of thought: Give the shop floor people access to any and all information, tools and whatever it takes to sort problems out. Or give them what they need and only what they need to do the planned work. Anything outside of the scheduled work flow (i.e. troubleshooting problems) was, in theory, to be designed out of the process. And Boeing management was in love with their firm grip on 'the process'.
I worked on a system that gave shop floor technicians access to QA procedures including requirements for 'out of sequence' work and systems check out. The sorts of things that one has to do in the event systems need to be taken apart, debugged and reassembled. Our group was a great supporter of the 'give then everything they need' philosophy. However, we butted heads with management that didn't want anything that allowed deviation from 'the plan'. Needless to say, we got a lot of support from the shop floor, but not from management. When it came time to retire our system and repace it with management's 'preferred process', some of the techs proposed a race between our system and the incoming one. With ours, test procedures could be located and printed within a few seconds. The new system required shop floor personnel to locate one of the few managers in possession of the proper login authority to access out of sequence procedures. It took them about 40 minutes to locate such a person.
I'm not sure how things were finally settled, as I didn't hang around for much longer.
In the interests of balance, I should also say that I'm sure brand A have been afflicted with similar issues too.