Re: @Ledswinger
"...an era when we have oohed and aahed over Windows 95. F35 has been first flown in an era when smartphone meant either Nokia Communicator..."
I think we need to get this into perspective. The Spitfire went from design to first flight in less than two years, and five years after that was in large-scale production and having life-changing results. Now I know that somebody will argue that modern aircraft are vastly more complex than the Spitfire or Harrier, but the Spitfire was designed a mere 35 years after the Wright Brothers first demonstrated powered flight, and quite frankly in the late 30s people knew vastly less about aerodynamics and had vastly less choice of structural materials than they do today.
Add to that that in the late 30s drawings were prepared by hand, any attempt at numerical simulation had to be done by hand, and precision machining was controlled by hand.
So we really should be asking: WTF are we doing wrong? Why is our society unable to build stuff which does the job to the same extent as the Spitfire, Harrier, Apollo program and so on /despite/ our better understanding of the underlying science and our engineering advances? Just about every large-scale aerospace project has the same problems, and most other fields of industry only survive because they're able to recall products and retrofit fixes... and don't anybody get me going on the deficiencies of public-sector IT projects.
-- MarkMLl
Biting the hand that feeds IT
