The brilliance of fine engineering
The BBC have been started a series on how things are made! The first episode was on the making of a nuclear submarine – perhaps not something that touches most of us!
But the second episode was much more the ‘touch of the common man’ as it was about the building of a commercial jet engine, the Trent engine built by Rolls Royce of Derby, England.
Anyway, I’m not going to natter on other than to say that not all regulatory bodies are bad in this world. Indeed, the aviation industry has shown how splendid both engineering and the certification processes can be in giving us a incredibly safe form of transport.
There are plenty of YouTube videos on the Trent engine but here are two that I found of great interest. (Thanks to Simon H for the pointers.)
Rolls Royce Trent Engine Certification video
A380 Loss of Blade test
By Paul Handover
Learning from Dogs 
Integrity in engineering is sine qua non.
Integrity in history is harder, full of surprises, and where future and better morality lays. Some of my good American friends have a real problem with my sense of history, to the point of claiming that good Americans should never read me again. Just because they negate all knowledge about the Ethyl Corporation of America of 1939…
PA
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