Re:The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its ...
by dublin on Thursday March 04, 2021 @06:04PM
(#26349760)
You entire comment is monstrous bigotry of the modern. The B-2 was in fact the first large, complex product ever built entirely from a CAD database - a factor in its huge cost.
As a CIM Manager for a major B-2 subcontractor, I can assure you they knew what they were doing. Yes, even 30-35 years ago. Yes, they knew as much or more then than we know today about BOMs, manufacturing, CAD, digital records and archiving, documentation and configuration management, and everything else. (BOMs weren't in SAP, but they were in mainframe DBs, ERP systems, and CAD systems, some of which are still sold and used today.) I have literally never worked on any other program in my entire career that was as well-run and orchestrated overall as the B-2 program. (We called it ADP-101 at the time, and for the first few years, we didn't even know what we were working on!)
Nice tid bit for the B-52. These old birds, old in the sense of designed pre CAD, are quite hard to understand for modern manufacturing. Even manufacturers rely on retires sometimes to understand these old drawings for their own planes. Then again, the B-2 shouldn't fall in that category.
I suspect that people in the armed forces, at least some, understand maintenance but have no idea of manufacturing. A couple of years ago I had spontaneous "workshop" session where we discussed how we could leverage BoMs and data collected during production and assembly from the manufacturer for version and build tracking of military hardware. I used to work for that manufacturer in question, so I knew what data they collected during production. The only we would have had to figure out was which BoM to use. That was immediately shot down by middle management, because it would cost 10s of millions to get the rights for that data. Nevermind that it was there from day one, even in SAP so our client wouldn't even had issues with compatibility.
And none of the people I had these discussions with had any idea how BoMs and such are used. In these environments it is quite easy for crucial knowledge, especially of highly specialised parts and processes, to be lost.