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I was always impressed by how seriously they took their jobs and how they were quick to tell anyone that they knew people's live could be at stake. The complexity of the work made experienced and long career hands absolutely necessary. The gravity of the job always weighs heavy on new hires and the help they received can't be measured. The online and classroom training that all receive during the length of their careers is extensive.
In all the many different trades at the base, two jokes were always told and I guarantee they're still being told today: Classroom training taught me how to drink coffee. And they wouldn't fly on AA because they knew the guys who worked on the planes. (The first one is absolutely true. The second was is not, especially after the company started flying to New Zealand!)
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/afacwa/pages/687/attac... (page 318)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/29/us/azriel-al-blackman-dea... | https://archive.today/dmcaA
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/105781-lo...
https://www.local591.com/docs/Al%20Blackman%20Passing.pdf
One thing that can't be codified in procedures is what I call "situational awareness" for lack of a better term. I don't think you can learn how to work in a machine shop safely from a book. Or recognize when a complex design is heading towards being unworkable. In my organization, the older engineers have a sixth sense for projects that are going to be cancelled.
There's a reason why older drivers (up to a point of course) pay less for car insurance, yet the rules are the same for all of us.
This strikes me as something one learns very slowly over time. Safety takes time to internalize after close calls or seeing people get hurt. Same with complexity, it takes going through project after project to get a gut feeling for what works and what doesn't.
Based on anecdotal evidence and experience, I absolutely believe that. Just a few weeks ago near me an elderly driver caused a crash that killed herself and a passenger in another car when she failed to follow a curve and drove head-on into opposing traffic on a road with a 40MPH speed limit.
Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a 777 doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated and republished to all maintenance crews worldwide.
It doesn't matter how well you document things there will always be tribal / personal knowledge.
Even if stuff is written down you have to know where to look.
It’s a great story, but I assure you there is a pretty high percentage of airplanes flying with missing parts and systems placarded as INOP in both military and civilian aviation.
That's one of the things I love about AI: It's excellent at figuring out where to look, because it can digest so many documents so much faster than a person.
It takes also many years of study before they will let you touch any living person with your scalpel, and then many years of apprenticeship with actual surgeons when you do touch people with your tools.
I can imagine maintaining a big jumbo jet also requires some specialized practical knowledge you cannot acquire just by reading books and looking at nice little videos.
The problem is not to explain things when everything works perfectly. The problem is getting the ability to diagnose the root causes of defects using all your senses and your intuition. That is not taught in books.
I’ve only been to London once, for work. One of the coolest things I did when I was there was to take a black London cab from the financial district to Heathrow when I was leaving. It was probably a 30 minute drive. The driver had been driving a cab since 1982. He told me all about the requirements and training for being a cab driver and a bunch of other things that I did not know (for example, they own the cars, and they can choose when they work). He was also a wealth of information about London, as you can imagine, and pointed out lots of interesting things as we drove.
It was probably a $50 cab ride, but worth every penny (even though it wasn’t my money since it was a work trip).
That doesn't apply to private hire vehicle drivers afaik.
Just making a point that everyone else’s job always seems simple from the outside.
Ezpz
Software engineering is unique in STEM in that it has nearly zero regulations. Nobody keeps anybody accountable for quality and there are never any legal consequences. No other STEM jobs is like that, usually there are thousand hoops to jump through to do anything non-standard, but in software there's nothing. You can literally go to prison for forging an aircraft maintenance log, but you can forge JIRA logs to your heart's content and never get prosecuted (at most your employer can sue you for damages but that's it).
I guess a more relatable way of conveying this is that you can have the recipe from a michelin star chef, but you're still not going to get anywhere close to michelin star quality.
oh and post holes, some are easy and some you hit mystery chunks of concrete(!?). It was like archaeological expedition trying to get deep enough holes in the ground.
For quite a while, he hated having to test on real hardware because all sorts of failure modes that he couldn't predict: belts stretching, mechanisms hitting each other or not lining up properly and losing position, etc. kept happening and interfering with his nice "this will only take 15 minutes to test" estimates, making it an all-afternoon affair.
OTOH, it was that unpredictability and having to deal with weird stuff that I liked about programming embedded systems.
I hope you're right :) You probably are too. But even with that, there is a reason it's a profession and not something we ask gig-workers to do, it takes expertise and skill like any other skilled work, even though all the literal actions one might take is technically written down somewhere. Even in such industries, experts would get "hunches" about what is wrong, and are able to quicker pinpoint issues, and similar things. Or "getting a bad feeling" before something is actually evidentially bad, which prevented human disaster more than once in history.
I think if you consider that the job couldn't be done by just anybody who can read and follow instructions, then it might not be as easy as just "follow what the manuals say" and in those cases expertise, knowledge and experience matters a great deal.
Often it is not possible to separate the technique from the man. Things like riding a bike or flying a helicopter come to mind. A lot of what makes a master good cannot be written down anywhere. There isn't anything tangible to actually lose.
How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently? You could explain the principles and general ideas, but the apprentice is going to need to get scraped up a bit before they actually learn anything that matters. The apprentice willing to suffer repeated failure is where most of the heavy lifting occurs. The master is mostly a backstop to keep the apprentice alive.
Worse is that they who have the knowledge don't realise that others don't know what they know, it's completely automatic and ingrained to the owner.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
You don't. You put these people together for some years to work on stuff together, and a small percentage of this "intangible" feelings, knowledge and experiences you cannot write down somehow magically passes over to the other person.
Of course, the apprentice will still require their own repeated failures and uphill battle even getting close, but having someone who mastered the craft near you as you go through this, makes the whole process a hell of a lot faster.
The amount of tacit knowledge I am applying to the architecture of my projects is probably too deep for LLMs to even approach, IMO. It takes very little to have Opus or even Fable make a mess that is obviously bad to anyone who understand even the first thing about effective software architecture.
Your bicycle case is a great example. People don't learn to ride a bike from a book. They receive in-person instruction of exactly the type the comment you're responding to was writing about.
To relate this back to the comment thread, people don't even always know the full extent of what they have learned.
Generally speaking (only a Sith deals in absolutes), engineers want to engineer.
There is no incentive for management to nudge the best performing engineers to teach their expertise in their craft[s]. A high-performing engineer "reflects good" on a manger. The way incentives are generally structured, this becomes a problem that perpetuates itself: Everyone in the management pipeline gets more money for the high performing engineer to keep engineering, rather than to teach.
The point of hiring someone specifically to do this is that he might simply want to keep on working, uninterrupted by apprentices or other demands, so the recorder must be a second person dedicated to knowledge maintenance.
This is, pardon the cliche, the exact type of “outside of the box” thinking that is completely impossible in shareholder-driven (or PE-driven) corporate America.
More and more I believe that we associate people with great ideas not because they were exceptionally capable of great thought, but because they managed to impose their ideas upon others through force of will, political chicanery, and sorcery.
Some mechanics are just good mechanics, and that's okay.
I remember posting on PM about 15 years ago asking how to fix a mistake I kept making and he gently smacked me on the head and basically said just learn to do it right in the first place. Which was really the only good answer!
https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/best-way-to...
Just a couple of examples.
> He’s the guy who sits with the new kids at lunch and passes it on.
Hopefully you are apprenticing many junior engineers!
When he passed away, his wife rented the shop out, to a drug addict who pawned off all the tools he could sneak out in his car.... when there was eventually an auction, not much was left, but I did at least get to buy an (empty) toolbox he had had me assemble from scrap lumber (which I still have on my workbench as a remembrance).
That said, for a flip side look at this sort of thing, consider the case of Charles Babbage trying to get his Analytical Engine made and the dispute over who owned the tooling, him or Joseph Clement, with the latter winning because at the time, a workman owned his tools, even if they were specifically constructed for a customer's project.
It is only because we know and can compare that we judge.
Remember, when we were hunter & gatherers, before becoming bound to the land and tilling that land, we had different gifts and talents that have all been lost. For better or worse.
Or closer to home: barely anyone remembers black and white television or the feeling it must have been to view the moon landing on one.[1] Cathode ray TVs have gone the way of the Dodos - good or bad? Who knows.
Whether a long term or short term outlook is better or worse, no one can tell because there aren't any goals nor targets to meet in evolution.
[1] https://archive.org/details/apollo-8-bbc-coverage
I feel like some "old" people have the weird idea that "young" people are just clueless about anything older than themselves. Just because some technology is no longer in use, does not mean that you don't get in touch with it. You don't grow up in isolation. There are always museums and of course the appliances of your parents and grandparents, in this case their photos.
All the films beyond some point are black and white and it's not like there were no significant events during that time. (Although I have seen some color-pictures from the 1900s, but the majority of course wasn't.)
Sure, you only use the technology from the past 15-20 years in daily life, but I feel like the technology you get in touch with is more closer to 80-100 years.
Also the BBC still issue black and white TV licences, I suspect my phone is eligible for one! Still about 3.5k of them working apparently.
Apollo 11 landed in 1969. Roughly a third of living Americans are of an age to remember watching it, and more than half of them would have done so on black and white TVs. (Color TV's didn't pass 50% of sales & ownership until 1972.)
Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
On a personal or organizational level there is no point in making investments that will turn profit over the course of decades if over the ~5yr horizon there's there's always the looming risk that the government will kick your craft out of the country at the behest of the people.
What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies?
The math is simple and they teach it in every business school in the country.
I respect people who can do it, who can live a simple life doing the same thing every single day and be happy about it. Sometimes I wish I had that ability. But it is very much _not_ me.
See: https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...
Then I caught myself thinking the same way about the fisherman that lives next door, who I pass every day and he sits and does something with his fishing nets. To me, it all looks the same way, so I asked myself how he can sit every day doing the same thing, over and over again. Asking him about it, apparently it's not so "the same" every day to him, as depending on the expected weather and what not, he prepares the net differently, and sometimes tries new things for various reasons. Maybe he is bored after all these years, I never asked, but I learned not to assume at least that things might look the same from the outside, but the person might be having a completely different perspective on it.
Like a taxi driver, it's just "driving all day" right? For a lot of people, seemingly this brings them a "no day is ever the same" experience and they love it and don't see any repetition, at least lots of drivers I've talked to felt this way.
Every single possible airplane maintenance operation is detailed on task cards that mechanics follow. Probably there is some small amount of tribal knowledge, but virtually everything is documented with step-by-step procedures, which includes the tools you need, every step, all torque values, etc.
It’s not like being an electrician or pipefitter where you have to make your pipe or conduit get from point A to point B by following the construction code, airplane safety is crucial enough that documenting and standardizing airplane maintenance was done long ago.
Vote republicans out so we can restore the 1950s tax rates and financial regs that prevented CEOs fron cutting wages and outsourcing to make themselves personally richer. CEOs pay nothing for their stock, it is given them for free. Then they take tax free loans on the stock and that allows them to bubble the stock price for tax free loan money. CEOs self enrich off of a cycle of bubbles and pops.
It's because management didn't value it. They put the veteran on on more jobs rather on moving them to training, because short term it's more profitable, and mid term it's easier to poach veterans off competition rather than train them in house
0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Azrael
Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.
Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.
The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.
just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.
Azriel: All mighty servant of Yahweh. He who cleaves soul from body, angel of death. Archangel.
You can hover over the "hours ago" link and the timestamp does not match the title.
Why is the timestamp of my comment (and many others) of this post manipulated? Was this post recently merged with another duplicate?
Interesting you've been here at least since then and haven't noticed it before, happens relatively often, dare I say at least once a day?