
Airliner Repair, 24/7 (2008) - wallflower
https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/airliner-repair-247-9974457/?all
======
jacquesm
I wrote about another company in the aerospace industry that serves a niche,
the people that deal with crashes:

[https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-company-you-have-never-
heard-o...](https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-company-you-have-never-heard-of/)

~~~
karambahh
I am surprised by your comment: "After a year I still haven’t found a way to
adapt their model to the IT world"

I have worked in "disaster recovery" modes within a larger group of companies
(think "Berkshire Hathaway" large), where we were basically meeting regularly
to discuss opportunities, new findings and, above all, knew each other phone
numbers & area of expertises.

There were basically no issues wtr to the business model, as we were all owned
by the same company and when were working in "commando/disaster mode" shit had
hit the fan furiously enough for noone to care about the costs. That may have
simplified the things a great deal...

To me, Kenyon (and a few other players in their fields) is nothing more than
an on-call, dependable team of experts with pre-set rates and a yearly fee for
availability. I know for a fact that companies dealing in IT security do have
such contracts (there's been numerous articles in the press about the Maersk
disaster a few months/years back) and would expect that services similar for
every aspects of IT ("our billing system has been offline for the past 13
hours", "our main DC has just been destroyed by an earthquake" and so on...)?

What have been the blockers you stumbled upon?

~~~
jacquesm
The fact that range of downsides is pretty much unlimited, and that customers
are unwilling to recognize that until the moment arrives. In the airline
business crashes are a statistical thing, but in IT everybody seems to think
that disasters only happen to other operators.

~~~
karambahh
You're in fact absolutely right.

I've had countless encounters with C-level execs who could recognize that if
theur point of sales software was down, it meant a loss of x M€/day, or that
if this SCADA system crashed it meant casualties within the work force. They
could be rational enough to attach a price tag to these events

Despite this, it always went back to "yeah but last time my computer crashed,
little Timmy fixed it, it's a no brainer, and my IT director has these things
called backups".

The same people have contingency plans for anything non digital (including
services like Blackwater guys or kenyon and so on), but digital has "no real
consequences".

I hoped the Maersk disaster of last year would lead to a change of mind, but
unfortunately we're not there yet.

------
gmac
_“We’ve literally had passengers with tickets in their hands looking out the
window of the gate at us as we were boxing up our equipment to leave”_

I do hope this is only after minor repairs, and that after taking apart and
reassembling an airframe the plane first goes up and comes down again with
only a test pilot/crew.

~~~
jonah
I boarded an international flight (KLM to AMS) once and we taxied out and
lined up for takeoff. The pilot then came on and said there was a mechanical
issue and we'd have to go back to the gate.

We then sat on the plane for several hours while a crew (replaced|repaired)
the APU. It was pretty disconcerting to be sitting there and hearing the
drilling and grinding emanating from the hold and reverberating throughout the
plane.

This was in 2000, so my memory is a bit vague but I do recall taxing out at
one point, pushing up the power and then powering back down and returning to
the gate for more work.

When the repairs were finally done, we immediately took off and made it across
the Atlantic safely. It was one of the stranger air travel experiences I've
had.

~~~
GhettoMaestro
I’d suspect a lot of those change and go scenarios are backup/redundancy
failure. Probably could have made it on a single, but thank god we have
regulations saying hell no.

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9nGQluzmnq3M
The Delhi accident mentioned appears to be this: [https://aviation-
safety.net/database/record.php?id=19880724-...](https://aviation-
safety.net/database/record.php?id=19880724-0)

~~~
unixhero
Great database! Thanks.

------
yread
> I suggested that future airliners made of advanced impact-resistant
> materials might never become tomorrow’s AOGs, Bruce Rund had a prediction of
> his own. “Somebody will figure out a way.”

Definitely, like this 787 repair

[https://www.seattletimes.com/business/ethiopian-787-flying-a...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/ethiopian-787-flying-
again-after-secretive-repair-of-fire-damage/)

