LeftRight's Comments (3603)

“The term is "plausible deniability" -- although at this point it's just "deniability", nothing plausible about it.”

“Not that I saw that, but if they did then they had pretty good data and high level of situational confidence before they made that decision.”

“Teacher pay is not the problem Leftright, its accountablity. Even highly paid teachers are performing poorly. I had teachers at my university who were tenured, couldn't give a &^*& and paid well. The unions have a monopoly on teh students and nobody should be defending it unless you are in the union and fear your job. We need competition in education.”

“I think you miss the point. For all those 'baggers questioning where Obama was born (as if that was relevant) - those same 'baggers cannot see their own hypocracy when told that McCain was born in Panama.”

“80,000+ but they retired those years ago. I saw one fly exactly once.”

“Good thing we leave the engineering to engineers and the comments to everyone else. You see there are things used when designing, building and testing called engineering and scientific methods. These "things" require extensive data collection, proving and testing to correlate the data in establishing conclusive proof of capability and cause/effect.

Luckily for some of these commentators engineering and science still hold true when airplanes are built (wish it applied also to climate and other sciences). If you don't understand why Boeing does all this testing (after building airliners for 60 plus years) and it "strikes" you as kinda weird...please...please...please refrain from commenting because "going with ones gut" in airplanes is like believing that your pure will has any impact in protecting you from the forces of nature and natural laws.”

“they want to set a good benchmark for flight test data.”

“For a maiden flight? ARe you kidding me, with that comment?”

“You'd be surprised, since those effects seem 'little' to you and me. In reality they're not. The force that wind exerts on something as small as a car can produce substantial effects. Water can goof up your tires, so how about a plane's landing gear? Rain actually adds weight to the plane and pushes on it, on top of running into various exposed bits and pieces.

When you're taking a baseline for a machine as large and complex as a jetliner, you want to eliminate those factors even if you're completely sure that it will operate fine under those conditions. (Your typical jetliner has a ton of work poured into it prior to its first flight to ensure just that, but until it's actually in the air, those are just assumptions - even if those assumptions are backed by laboratory testing and the performance of other products. You don't actually know exactly how it's going to work, only roughly how.) That way, when you do encounter those conditions, you can compare performance. This makes it much easier to identify where improvements can be made and where problems are likely to arise.”