I’m on the W3C’s Advisory Board (which, as its title suggests, gives advice to the W3C Team on various matters, as well as proposing edits to the Process Document for W3C). We hold a few meetings each year, mostly timed to coincide with larger W3C meetings such as the Technical Plenary week, or the Advisory Committee meetings. This week’s meeting was two days, just for us, and hosted by Boeing (thanks to Ann Bassetti, who put in an immense amount of work to find the right facility!). And Ann managed to get us on the last factory tour that was allowed to go on the factory floor. Future tours will only be allowed to watch from the mezzanine level.
The AB meeting itself went reasonably well; we discussed a lot of issues and came up with recommendations for W3C. I must admit though, the factory tour was much more memorable than the meeting itself.
I’ve had a soft spot for airplanes since being part of a project at Lufthansa back in 1993–4, when I was an SGML consultant in Germany. Flying these days is unpleasant but that’s the fault of the airlines, the inefficient security, and the long line-ups rather than the planes themselves. Visiting a factory allows you to imagine the romance of air travel without being confronted with the unpleasant reality of today’s air travel. There are some truly cool things about the mechanics of fitting planes together as well. At the end of the tour we got to see a 737 without wings, and the wings separately, and see where they put the bolts and rivets in that hold the wing to the plane. This is not something you want to look at if you’re nervous about flying. The engineers on the tour explained the specifications and how much they’re all over-engineered, but there were still a couple of nervous faces. Until it was pointed out that there are some 5000 737s out there, and the wings have never fallen off any of them.
Boeing has made a big deal of its new systems to build planes, as published in Boeing Frontiers — Getting Lean. Watching this system in action was impressive — you can really see the planes move. It was also fun to see some of the engineering systems they have in place to cope with the moving planes — they reminded me of the systems research physics accelerators use to cope with moving parts there. Good to see there is some benefit to fundamental physics research ;-).
And yes, they do use the web as well. All part of the “Lean” philosophy.
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