Re:New Air Force One instruction manuals cost $84M
by egd on Sunday April 26, 2020 @09:10PM
(#22991949)
You may never actually need all 100,000 pages, but you don't know in advance which pages you will need, and you'll definitely need that page when you need it.
Re:New Air Force One instruction manuals cost $84M
by GuiA on Sunday April 26, 2020 @09:07PM
(#22991934)
The cost of the information not being accessible when it is most urgently needed could easily be billions of dollars or many human lives.
Re:New Air Force One instruction manuals cost $84M
by swsh on Monday April 27, 2020 @02:40AM
(#22993467)
Well it also covers all of the sub-systems on the aircraft as well, from countermeasures to communications down to how to evacuate the aircraft toilet waste.
The information in that manual is probably spread over the domain of 100's of people all performing different roles. I don't think their is any expectation that one single human would read the entirety.
Kinda like your car manual or university textbook. I've never read mine from cover to cover, but it is a useful reference sometimes. Particularly in the case of Air Force One where I doubt an internet search covers most troubleshooting requirements.
The average reading speed is about a page every 1-2 minutes (for non technical texts). 100.000 pages would then be a 800-1600 hour read, which is about half a year for a person spending 8 hours a day just flipping through pages.
Obviously such a manual is probably not meant to be read cover to cover, but even compared to a reference work, it's three times the volume of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica - a giant amount of information to be easily used.