Ernest Christley wrote:
wrote:

If you designed an aircraft to leverage modern production lines, what
would it be made of?

Thanks!
Matt


Fairy dust 8*)
You have to consider the economics of the thing. Modern assembly lines
are set up and expected to produce hundreds of thousands/yr if not
millions/yr of a product. We're talking a yearly volume on the scale of
the entire US GA fleet. One airplane for every registered pilot. The
most you could hope with any airplane design is more on the order of
100s/yr. The type of tooling you speak of takes as much R&D as an
airplane design. All that cost has to be amortized somewhere in a
reasonable amount of time. You very quickly get to the point where you
can roll off airplanes that have never been touched by human hands, but
they're so expensive to pay for the tooling that no one can afford them.


I understand your argument, and it is absolutely valid. But humor me
for a moment, and lets assume that a market could be found. Call me an
optomotrist, but I think there might still be a market, even if the
pilots don't exist at the moment.

And just having the work done by a machine doesn't get you home free.
Machines break. They are usually out of calibration, and they rarely
work as designed the first time. So now you're paying people to watch
the machines. Machines that makes airplanes that can't be sold any
faster than it took the people to make the machines.

Understood. But speculation is the inbred half stepbrother of
invention, (or something), and I might speculate that their is an
abundance of machines being discarded as modern factories go to third
and fourth generation robotics, and that much of it can be had for a
song.


SA gave a tour of the Cirrus factory a month or two back. I think they
have it right. Automate the simple things. Have humans do the
complicated things. Design the airplane with the lowest possible parts
count. I suspect that they will slowly add more automation as the
capitol budget allows.


What parts did they automate?

-Thanks!
-Matt