> I'm sure there are analogs in oil and gas, or any other clustered industry.
My dad was the ops officer on an Air Force base in the 1960s. His job was to keep the base operational. The Vietnam War was ramping up, and the AF's need for transport airplanes outstripped their jets, so they pulled a bunch of propeller transports out of retirement.
The mechanics, however, were unable to get the old propeller engines to produce the rated power. They followed the directions in the manual, and it just didn't deliver. Frustrated, they pulled out of retirement some old mechanics from WW2.
Those old guys never looked at the manual, they just listened to the engines, tinkered with them, and soon got them delivering the power.
There's a lot of specialized expertise that never makes it into any manuals. But I still love the idea that those giant engines were tuned by ear :-) Those mechanics were the real deal.
When I was in Ireland studying my mentor told me a similar story. An old electric engineer was just tinkering his circuit board with his oscilloscope, he's so familiar with signals he can diagnose based on analogue information. My mentor also tried to explain to me (a computing student) what control theory is about. He said if you can send an impulse signal to a system and can tweak with that input, you basically got yourself a system in control theory (might be too naive a version but that's what my memory serves me).
Control/signal processing theory (it's basically the same maths) should be more common on CS courses: it's extremely useful for analysing a wide range of systems. Basically any system which is supposed to be self-regulating can be understood as a control system, and this is extremely relevant in today's distributed auto-scaling cloud systems (as well as important for a lot of DSP).
This reminds me of a story I once heard about shipbuilding during WW2. Supposedly, although designs and blueprints were made in great detail, following them today wouldn't give working ships, because the workers implementing them at the time saw where the designs wouldn't work and fixed them of their own initiative.
In a way, the opposite of today's optimizing compilers.
This happens all the time when you get stuff made. It's generally good and useful, but the real challenge is in getting these changes documented, and getting the changes verified against the original specification. The Hyatt Regency walkway collapse was a good example of this going wrong: while the original design was flawed, the fact that it wasn't easily manufactured meant it then got modified, and even though the builder discussed the changes with the designers, the designers did not check that their original calculations still applied and as a result the structure was substantially weakened and collapsed.
Also, making sure this process for exists and is documented precisely is one of the reasons medical devices are so expensive.
This was part of what got the RAF Nimrod programme eventually cancelled; they were ancient airframes that required an ongoing supply of spare parts, but as you describe building parts from the original plans didn't fit properly.
Yes, each airframe was essentially a completely different aircraft, although each was notionally built from the same plans. Bids for upgrades that were generated against a single reference airframe went massively over budget when executed because no two planes were the same.
The other thing that got the programme cancelled was the crash of Nimrod MR2 Aircraft XV230 in Afghanistan in 2006, as described in exhaustive detail in the Haddon Cave report [0 - pdf]. Part of the cause was design flaws introduced over years of updates, that interacted with each other fatally.
That's also true of WW2 aircraft. Drawings exist for, say, the P-51, but you can't build the airplane from the drawings because the drawings were made after the fact. The real design was the tooling and mechanics.
My dad was the ops officer on an Air Force base in the 1960s. His job was to keep the base operational. The Vietnam War was ramping up, and the AF's need for transport airplanes outstripped their jets, so they pulled a bunch of propeller transports out of retirement.
The mechanics, however, were unable to get the old propeller engines to produce the rated power. They followed the directions in the manual, and it just didn't deliver. Frustrated, they pulled out of retirement some old mechanics from WW2.
Those old guys never looked at the manual, they just listened to the engines, tinkered with them, and soon got them delivering the power.
There's a lot of specialized expertise that never makes it into any manuals. But I still love the idea that those giant engines were tuned by ear :-) Those mechanics were the real deal.