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Just Because We Can Do It, Doesn’t Mean We Should Do It by Britt Storkson Owner, P2FlowLLC The Concorde supersonic transport (SST) went into service in 1976. A fatal accident in 2000 spelled the beginning of the end of the Concorde, but the accident wasn’t what ended its career. The reason we don’t have commercial supersonic air travel today is because it isn’t economically viable. The SST never made any money. While supersonic air travel is indeed possible, it just isn’t practical. Paying over five times the airfare to save three hours on a flight from the U.S. to Europe did not compute for most air trav- elers. The Concorde cost almost $11 billion in today’s dollars to develop and build, and was nearly 10 times over budget. It used about 4 times as much fuel per passenger to cover the same distance. It was nothing more than a very expensive toy and a huge drain of tax dollars from the French and British taxpayers who funded the thing. The SST didn’t even recover its devel- opment costs, much less turn a profit. And the SST designers knew this was going to be the case long before it got off of the drawing board. This drives home the point: Just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should do it. Many things are possible, but not everything is practical. In fact, with computer controls, adding little used or poorly understood components can cause more problems than they solve because added complexity adds cost and unreliability. Also, the more complex the equipment is, the more likely the operators - even very skilled and competent operators - are to make mistakes. Then there’s the learning curve. If you pay an employee to learn one or more computer systems, wouldn’t you rather the employee be able to learn the system in one day or so, instead of needing one month or more for adequate comprehension? I can cite many examples, but I’ll use the average automobile as a case study here. The modern automobile is a complex machine with many different systems onboard. We have heating, cooling, gear drive, and fuel systems, and on and on. There are many things which could be monitored on the average car, such as fuel pressure, transmission temperature, wheel bearing temperature . . . you get the idea. On a car, we could have a dashboard with 20 or more gauges or indicator lights to advise us of what the car systems are doing, but we don’t. Why? First and foremost in almost every manufactured product is COST. It costs money to install these indicators, and the objective is to get the most money relative to the cost input. Secondly, with things like wheel bearing temperatures . . . wheel bearings so rarely go bad, the sensor would prob- ably fail before the wheel bearing did. Thirdly, the average car driver probably Serving the Drilling Industry www.starironworks.com 257 Caroline Street Punxsutawney, PA 15767 800-927-0560 • 814-427-2555 Fax: 814-427-5164 Need something special? Talk to us - we’ll make it happen faster than you think. Storkson cont’d on page 60. 18 JUNE 2017 WorldWide Drilling Resource ®