lightsaber From United States of America, joined Jan 2005, 10883 posts, RR: 100 Posted (4 months 1 week 2 hours ago) and read 1217 times:
In January 2005 I joined a.net after lurking for a full year.
In that time I have joined in discussions on:
1. What will NW replace the DC-9 with?
2. Will AA re-engine the MD-80?
3. PW6000 (you'll find I'm biased to talk on engines)
4. The whole A380 EIS and production SAGA (I remain a fan of the plane) including the A380F.
5. 7E7 proposal to 787 EIS
6. From practically day 1 topics on restarting the 757 line (hint: too late)
7. EK threads galore (rise of mid-east aviation)
8. Rise of the LCCs
9. I just stopped participating in the "FR will charge for the toilet" threads...
10. Indian aviation (I'd have to look back at which of the threads I started... but back when IT was 'up and comming!')
11. Massive growth in Chinese aviation
12. ARJ-21 discussions (where no one has answered my question on what unique market niche it fills)
13. The rise of Chinese aviation
14. Witnessed the 'fadding away' of some favorite names in air travel: NW, CO, HP...
15. Rise (or even founding) of new airlines: Air Asia, B6, EK, TK, VX
16. The attempt at all business class trans-Atlantic
17. The first attempts and then shutdown of ULH flights (well, soon shutdown)
18. The maturation of the 50-seat RJ market
19. The entry into the market of the E-jets (which will now be re-engined).
20. The planning of some massive airports that have yet to happen: DWC and the new Beijing
21. Several discussions on the XWB engine (and how RR put the 2nd turbine stage other than where I expected)
22. I've learned quite a bit more on route planning (not enough to dispatch...)
23. Wrote my first trip report
24. Watched the A330 be improved faster than I thought possible, and I'm a fan of the type!
25. Came to understand the payload/range chart better than I had to for flight test!
26. Now I understand how cabin outfitting and catering impact the true payload/range chart
27. I have tolerated an amazing amount of A vs. B to wade through for those 'nuggets.'
28. How kids will commute to school on very short routes in Scotland
29. Quite a bit of Pan Am nostalgia
30. Mostly read, absorbed, and learned.
For every time I posted, I read at least 50 posts! (I'm a very fast reader)
98% of my discussions have been in general aviation. I simply wanted to express
To those on my RU list. Thank you for making this a wonderful experience.
For those not on the list, its been maxed out for a while! Mea culpa.
Tell that to everyone who has him on their RU list.
Lightsaber, I'd like to offer you my personal congratulations, and thanks for helping to make this website what it is. I have always valued your commentary on a variety of issues, and it has helped me tremendously in my endeavours to learn more about the various issues/topics in aviation.
HB-IWC From Greece, joined Sep 2000, 4416 posts, RR: 75 Reply 4, posted (4 months 1 week 1 hour ago) and read 982 times:
I would not normally contribute to a thread like this one, but I gladly make an exception now. Thank you for 10,000 valuable contributions to the forum. I have found your interventions always constructive and often forcing other contributors to think outside the box and try to clarify their position more clearly. That is what this forum should be about.
As an airline industry professional, I have found your many questions and positions not only indicative of your profound interest, but also encouraging in that they show a persistent will to know more about the often high tech aspects of the aviation industry. For myself, I find it good to know that there is an audience that is keen to interact about the operational organization of the civil aviation industry, and I value your questions and opinions in these matters.
tugger From United States of America, joined Apr 2006, 4657 posts, RR: 7 Reply 5, posted (4 months 1 week 1 hour ago) and read 937 times:
Hey.... ummm... not to diss your amazing accomplishment but.... uhh..... this doesn't belong in Civ Av. I''m guessing you knew that but wanted it to be seen by everyone (just like many who post non-aviation post in the Civ Av forum )
Beyond that, congratulations!!
Here is a room of people sharing how much they care about your accomplishment:
Tugg
I don’t know that I am unafraid to be myself, but it is hard to be somebody else. -W. Shatner
lightsaber From United States of America, joined Jan 2005, 10883 posts, RR: 100 Reply 9, posted (4 months 6 days 23 hours ago) and read 768 times:
Quoting jporterfi (Reply 2): Lightsaber, I'd like to offer you my personal congratulations,
Thank you and everyone else who have helped make this site worth going to.
Quoting HB-IWC (Reply 4): Thank you for 10,000 valuable contributions to the forum. I have found your interventions always constructive and often forcing other contributors to think outside the box and try to clarify their position more clearly.
I have truly appreciate your posts too. You are one of those who make it worth coming to a.net.
Quoting tugger (Reply 5): this doesn't belong in Civ Av.
The mods found that out and moved it. I had to search a bit to find my own thread!
Quoting moose135 (Reply 7): Congratulations, Lightsaber! Now, step away from the computer and get a life...
Pyrex From Portugal, joined Aug 2005, 3542 posts, RR: 28 Reply 10, posted (4 months 6 days 22 hours ago) and read 750 times:
Quoting lightsaber (Thread starter): To those on my RU list. Thank you for making this a wonderful experience.
For those not on the list, its been maxed out for a while! Mea culpa.
Thank you very much for all your invaluable contribution to this website. I have learned a lot from you and even got some pointers for my master thesis way back when I still had some connection to aviation... Keep'em coming!
Read this very carefully, I shall write this only once!
PPVRA From Brazil, joined Nov 2004, 8497 posts, RR: 42 Reply 11, posted (4 months 6 days 2 hours ago) and read 651 times:
Quoting lightsaber (Thread starter): In that time I have joined in discussions on:
1. What will NW replace the DC-9 with?
2. Will AA re-engine the MD-80?
3. PW6000 (you'll find I'm biased to talk on engines)
4. The whole A380 EIS and production SAGA (I remain a fan of the plane) including the A380F.
5. 7E7 proposal to 787 EIS
6. From practically day 1 topics on restarting the 757 line (hint: too late)
7. EK threads galore (rise of mid-east aviation)
8. Rise of the LCCs
9. I just stopped participating in the "FR will charge for the toilet" threads...
10. Indian aviation (I'd have to look back at which of the threads I started... but back when IT was 'up and comming!')
11. Massive growth in Chinese aviation
12. ARJ-21 discussions (where no one has answered my question on what unique market niche it fills)
13. The rise of Chinese aviation
14. Witnessed the 'fadding away' of some favorite names in air travel: NW, CO, HP...
15. Rise (or even founding) of new airlines: Air Asia, B6, EK, TK, VX
16. The attempt at all business class trans-Atlantic
17. The first attempts and then shutdown of ULH flights (well, soon shutdown)
18. The maturation of the 50-seat RJ market
19. The entry into the market of the E-jets (which will now be re-engined).
20. The planning of some massive airports that have yet to happen: DWC and the new Beijing
21. Several discussions on the XWB engine (and how RR put the 2nd turbine stage other than where I expected)
22. I've learned quite a bit more on route planning (not enough to dispatch...)
23. Wrote my first trip report
24. Watched the A330 be improved faster than I thought possible, and I'm a fan of the type!
25. Came to understand the payload/range chart better than I had to for flight test!
26. Now I understand how cabin outfitting and catering impact the true payload/range chart
27. I have tolerated an amazing amount of A vs. B to wade through for those 'nuggets.'
28. How kids will commute to school on very short routes in Scotland
29. Quite a bit of Pan Am nostalgia
30. Mostly read, absorbed, and learned.
And you also managed to get married in this time, right? So, since you got more time on your hands now, we'll be expecting a faster rate of new posts!
Always enjoy your posts! Congrats!
"If goods do not cross borders, soldiers will" - Frederic Bastiat
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10569 posts, RR: 21 Reply 12, posted (4 months 6 days 1 hour ago) and read 631 times:
Thanks for your wonderfully detailed posts over the years.
I've learned tremendous amounts about jet aircraft engines and many related topics from you.
I've also learned a lot about the things that matter to that industry from a business side as well.
I've enjoyed how you've shared your insights with us, and have turned us on to the thoughts of your network of contacts as well.
Oh, and I've enjoyed the occasional plug you've put in for Pratt as well as the chagrin you've showed at some of their "less than optimum" decisions over the years.
I guess you should add to your list above the phenomenal success story the GTF is well on the way to becoming, and putting Pratt right back into the role of major player in the single aisle commercial engine market, especially if GTF kicks Leap's butt on the A320NEO.
Also the long awaited appearance of CMCs, one of the holy grails of the jet engine business.
lightsaber From United States of America, joined Jan 2005, 10883 posts, RR: 100 Reply 13, posted (4 months 5 days 22 hours ago) and read 611 times:
Quoting Revelation (Reply 12): Oh, and I've enjoyed the occasional plug you've put in for Pratt as well as the chagrin you've showed at some of their "less than optimum" decisions over the years.
I've been in the 'trenches' for some of those 'less than optimum' decisions. But they are doing well now.
Quoting Revelation (Reply 12): I guess you should add to your list above the phenomenal success story the GTF is well on the way to becoming, and putting Pratt right back into the role of major player in the single aisle commercial engine market, especially if GTF kicks Leap's butt on the A320NEO.
I'm excited about the GTF. In particular... well, I'm back on the commercial side and I have a wee bit of exposure to the GTF.
The 'first principal physics' of the GTF have been there to see forever. (RR had an patent on the idea that expired in 1972 IIRC.)
Quoting Revelation (Reply 12): Also the long awaited appearance of CMCs, one of the holy grails of the jet engine business.
That amazes me. I witnessed testing of a CMC gas turbine during my first internship! Ok, witnessed is a strong word for an intern, but you get the idea... Ghad, dare I mention that was 22 years ago?!?
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10569 posts, RR: 21 Reply 14, posted (4 months 5 days 12 hours ago) and read 563 times:
Quoting lightsaber (Reply 13): I've been in the 'trenches' for some of those 'less than optimum' decisions. But they are doing well now.
I grew up in CT and went to UConn and knew a few classmates that were headed off to Pratt and/or other UTC shops. I also got my master's degree at the Hartford Graduate Center and got to know many UTC folks, and even dated a nice girl who was an engineer from UTC for a while.
Seems some of your experiences parallel mine. I was "in the trenches" when IBM was making some of their various attempts to put UNIX onto various platforms. The one thing that lives on from this era is AIX for the various Power (originally known as RS/6000) chips, but I worked on AIX for various other RISC, Intel and mainframe platforms. The "less than optimum" decision was to focus too much on the Power series, which took quite a while to come up with both low-cost and high-end solutions, and some can argue that the low-cost solutions still aren't.
Some less than well known facts from this era is that IBM owned something like 25% of Intel at the time, and that the software I worked on was used by Intel to develop the 80486 chip!
Luckily for those in my field, a Finnish teenager took interest in learning how 80386 mode worked on his PC and also was a bit familiar with Minix. The result is Linux, which runs on all of the remaining IBM products and countless others at any/all price point you should care to hit.
Luckily for Linux and IBM, a certain Irving Waldowski-Berger was the right executive in the right place to drive IBM into the Linux market, and now IBM is usually the #1 or #2 contributor of code to the Linux kernel.
Quoting lightsaber (Reply 13): The 'first principal physics' of the GTF have been there to see forever. (RR had an patent on the idea that expired in 1972 IIRC.)
I wonder how long the same could be said for the jet turbine itself, before Ohain and Whittle decided to have at it.
Quoting lightsaber (Reply 13): That amazes me. I witnessed testing of a CMC gas turbine during my first internship! Ok, witnessed is a strong word for an intern, but you get the idea... Ghad, dare I mention that was 22 years ago?!?
Seems my internship at IBM was around 28 years ago. I remember being very intimidated by the fact that they were willing to pay me (pay me?) the princely sum of $11/hour and they put around $40k worth of hardware onto my desk. At that point in time, it was a Moto 68000 running at 8 MHz and had an unbelievable 512k of memory and two 8" floppy drives. By the end of my internship, it had 2 megs of memory and a 10 Megabyte hard drive! If you were nice to the hardware guys, they'd show you the prototype 68020 board running at 20 MHz!
Quoting lightsaber (Reply 13): And I'm looking forward to what happens going forward. Although a nitpick, I 'lurked' through most of 2004.
Me too.
Anything you want to throw out there to look for?
In my case, it's multiple cores. Sure, that's been around for quite a while, but now we see dual and quad core phones and desktops with 16 cores and servers with 64, and it's all going to do nothing but increase, which means lots of work for us engineers, since most software we use was written for exactly one core.
RussianJet From Kazakhstan, joined Jul 2007, 6348 posts, RR: 23 Reply 17, posted (4 months 5 days 7 hours ago) and read 521 times:
Well done mate. Great achievement. Ignore the 'nobody cares' type comments - you have my respect (though obviously not in your maxed-out-RR-list-type sense).
✈ Every strike of the hammer is a blow against the enemy. ✈
lightsaber From United States of America, joined Jan 2005, 10883 posts, RR: 100 Reply 18, posted (4 months 3 days 21 hours ago) and read 446 times:
Quoting Revelation (Reply 14): Anything you want to throw out there to look for?
In my case, it's multiple cores. Sure, that's been around for quite a while, but now we see dual and quad core phones and desktops with 16 cores and servers with 64, and it's all going to do nothing but increase, which means lots of work for us engineers, since most software we use was written for exactly one core.
I'm very excited on where aircraft computers will go in the next few years. The PowerPc 7410 dominates the industry today as it is the 'high power' CPU that can take if when cabin pressure is lost (very low power CPU). With the new multi-core mobiles being more powerful with less power consumption, the computers on aircraft will become faster and we'll see new features that will be invisible to the passengers but helpful to the flight crew appear. For example, better trimming during flight to cut fuel burn.
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I've been in the 'trenches' for some of those 'less than optimum' decisions. But they are doing well now. 
And I'm looking forward to what happens going forward. Although a nitpick, I 'lurked' through most of 2004. 
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