Originally Posted by
mad_jock
But all US international company's are struggling remaining on imperial. Nobody else has machine shops etc setup or calibrate to manufacture in imperial. Most engineers from the 1970's onwards in the rest of the world don't have a clue about imperial measurements or working with them. The 787 had issues with it which caused delays with it coming in service due to this. So if they intend to make use of foreign production facility's they virtually have to work in metric.
That was the case 20 years ago and maybe for engineers trained 20 years ago but it's much less of an issue today. The reason is computers. Engineers don't deal with numbers in their head, they look at the 3D model on the computer and click around. Any serious manufacturing is all CNC which could care less. Need to measure something? Use a CMM and check if the measurements are red or green.
There's definite benefits to this. In the old days, you have to stick to whole numbers and fractions. In aerospace especially, this automation lets you go ahead and throw in curves, thin and shell parts to the minimum and so on. "Nice" numbers in any system are now gone.
Besides, there's a number of other issues beyond measurements that globalization has caused. One is datums and another is documentation. The Mars Orbiter crash you allude to was not caused by units. It was caused by documentation. The error was in the update of an ICD. Even if everybody was metric, you still need to document it. Force can be mN, N, daN, kN, kgf. Metric doesn't solve the problem.