Just to illustrate...

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

... that working on real aircraft (this is an A330) also comes with challenges...



"Find the wire from the SDU to the ATSU"

And then remotely, because I cannot travel to Hong Kong, so using a phone.

Hoppie

[asboyd]

I used to work in telephone exchanges....Try tracing a call through that but multiplied 60 times across multiple suites of equipment... Thank goodness for the digital age Hee Hee....




Cheers,

[Will]

"Find the wire from the SDU to the ATSU"

Hoppie, look at G12, H12, C7, and D7. ;-)

[martin]

Cheers,
Martin

[Hardy Heinlin]

It's nice that they even wrote "wire" on the wire!

[martin]

Perhaps because it looks a bit like an uncooked maccheroni ?

[JRBarrett]

As an avionics tech, two things bother me about this photo: The extensive use of plastic tie-wraps to secure wiring bundles. In my organization, we use lacing cored exclusively - much more labor intensive, but there are safety advantages.

At least some wires appear to be insulated with Kapton. Lighter weight by far than Teflon, but implicated in the loss of several aircraft. It does not age well, and is subject to moisture ingress

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Just a 1990s Airbus A330 rack. Nothing special, as far as I know. Things change...

Here's the 777 wall for ya   :-)

[beat578]

Amazing Pictures Jeroen. I always knew there are lot's of cables but I never thought about where they all get together and what i must look like behind those cockpit screens. Fascinating. Thanks for those looks inside a world usually hidden to us passengers.

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

These racks are actually in the equipment center, and both are facing with the front ("neat") end forward. To get access to the rear, where the wire harnesses are, you have to disassemble the most forward wall of the cargo hold. The large photo is taken from the cargo hold forward.

Making modifications to aircraft is a dark art. However, not any darker than making aircraft parts work in a sim   :-)

Hoppie

[cagarini]

Jeroen, the kind of stuff I would never the able to do - wiring is not my beach ...

Nice to see gals there :-)  They bring good energies, and they usually better with wiring....

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Yup. The one in the grey shirt is our lead engineer for the 777 fleets!

[Jeroen D]

Tricky environment for social distancing!

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

The whole COVID-19 situation completely disrupts everything. Normally we travel a lot to survey and install aircraft. That all ended in March. Most MROs now work with a split-shift setup where small groups of people always team together and move as a group.

I have done my last few aircraft surveys using a home-brew remote setup... I need hands and eyes in Hong Kong but once everything has been set up, I can nearly work as if I am aboard. For this we built a special telemetry unit that replaces an existing LRU in the rack and I can remotely access all relevant aircraft buses.



It's a hassle but it does get the job done. And working 12 hours shifted is easier if you don't need to travel half the globe for it, too.

No sweat: I can NOT take over the airplane controls even if somebody would somehow leave this box in the rack after we're done. You need significantly more invasive things to even get a shot at that.


Hoppie

[Will]

Very interesting. Let's say you're the man in charge. And let's say COVID-19 was eradicated tomorrow.

How many of your recent innovations would continue on? Would you go back to flying 15 hours to the other side of the world and sleeping in hotels? Or not?

Many industries, my own included, have been forced to innovate by the current circumstances, but we've come up with some things that are actually improvements on the old way of doing business. COVID-19 hasn't been all bad.

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

This actually has been discussed in depth (of course). The whole technology to have less specialistically trained or experienced field technicians carry around remote gear to allow the specialist to do the inspection obviously has its merits.

And it has advantages to have your complete lab environment at home, directly at hand. Looking something up that was unexpected is much easier from my study than on a phone somewhere. The same holds for keeping detailed notes.

Yet it also comes (currently) with more restrictions. Every time I organize one of these surveys I need to prepare a detailed plan, which takes time, and setting up/tearing down also takes time. Moreover the technology is not good enough (yet) to be virtually present there towards other people, so everything needs to be relayed to local assistance. In the end you lose most of your usual capability to improvise on the spot and to make things happen.

The "normal" way of doing these things is to give yourself a block of time, such as a week or two weeks, in which you return to the same aircraft type multiple times and you work with it as if it were a lab. So if you find something on Monday, you work on it through the evening and then have a solution to try on Tuesday. With plans that need to be performed multiple days ahead, this quick response style is out of the window, and what took a week now takes two months.

And lastly I like being out there and sniff the aircraft environment, which is now basically lost. Imagine looking through a hand-held phone at a single panel during Worldflight.

I can see potential in either way, with a remote engineer backing up a local engineer. Whether the remote one is at home or at the office, doing support work, or the remote one is on the aircraft, doing hands and eyes, is not so important.

Ideally you have three links:

1. Direct voice contact with the remote engineer using his/her headset to get clear audio either way, still allowing him/her to walk around a bit.
2. One-way video using some camera thing (may be a phone) on a simple stand, so that you can put it on the central pedestal and aim it somewhere.
The same phone may do voice, using a Bluetooth headset.
3. On-the-aircraft PC with internet and some remote control software, so that you can operate it nearly as if you were there. PC connected to the survey unit in the equipment rack.

This typically requires proper cellular coverage, maybe a WiFi hotspot in a good location for better throughput, and sufficient power supply.

But it is all doable.  Next one this Sunday at midnight EST. That, of course, is the other problem.


Hoppie

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Sunday was a success.
And I found another "interesting" effect.
So now I am back "aboard" in Hong Kong (virtually from Miami) playing with circuit breakers and reset buttons.

Here's a video (not mine!) of where the action takes place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lQ_hX61Ix8


Hoppie "sleep is optional"