On paper, this all makes a lot of sense.
What is going to happen when these airplanes start falling out of the sky because they are just too old?
50 years is a long time for a piece of machinery. There will be many failure modes that will be discovered in these planes.
The C-130 was thought to last forever. Until about 10 years ago, well used planes being used for firefighting starting having structural failure in flight. Suddenly, organizations flying the older airframes decided that it was no longer effective to take the risk of failure.
Just because it can be measured, doesn't mean it should be.
These 'measures' would be much more useful if they were used to determine the control limits of the software process being used.
'hours from pull request to merge' for an open source project is silly. who cares? 'number of commits a month'? who cares. what is the value of those commits.
why the focus on 'constant churn of software'? I don't see it.
The commercial aircraft part of McD was dead when the merger happened. The had a cash cow called the "MD-80", which was a derivative DC-9. That had stopped selling.
Boeing got more value out of the defense part of McD.
You can be great at one phase of your life. Motivating people, working 20 hours a day, sleeping in the office. Probably Tesla would have gone under without Elon pushing, motivating, and showing his investment (meaning of time and energy).
It doesn't mean you are a statesman, a scholar, or all knowing. About anything.
It also doesn't mean that you can solve every problem you encounter in life with that kind of behavour.
Tesla as a company is an impressive accomplishment. Elon does sound crazy, however.
many years ago, i was working as an electronic technician. we had a stack of processor boards (from a Perkin Elmer 7/32) that were removed from service. broken.
many different revisions, and only schematics for one revision of each board.
i thought it was hopeless. an older wiser tech taught me how.
plug a good board on an extender. run a diagnostic that fails in a loop. using a scope, look at every pin on the connector. write down what you see.
replace with a bad board. repeat.
which signals are different? chase them back. if the schematic does not match, get out a voltmeter and your eyes and draw a schematic that reflects how the board is wired.
he called this "good card - bad card".
and it worked. not going to make any claims about cost effectiveness, but we fixed every board. and my troubleshooting skills in digital electronics were greatly improved.
this was a 'fireman' kind of job. waiting for the system to break, so it didn't matter if 2 techs put a week into 1 circuit board.
space shuttle looked safe for the first 24 launches.
not shilling for Boeing. just pointing out that space is dangerous. and a couple of successes does not make the risk go away.
The SpaceX vehicle may look like the safest choice. But is it? A handful of manned flights does not prove that a vehicle is 'safe'. Likewise, some anomalies in 1 flight do not prove 'unsafe'.
Perhaps the knowledge of Starliner issues makes it more accurate to assess the risk.
Either vehicle could lose the crew on the return. "Astronauting" is a risky business.