Should Professionals Design Boats

Yes !

Education is the key, knowledge is power, ignorance is weakness in any field. A bright creative technical mind can achieve considerably more with a good education in the field simply because it lays a good groundwork as to the practical limits of design.

Far from "clogging a mind" or reducing creativity, education frees the individual to be far more creative and saves a lot of wasted time.

 

I doubt Arfons had any idea what was happening with Italian racing boats of the era, aside from the fact none of the Italian boats was running remotely close to 200 mph let alone 300 mph. Plus at the time every single boat that had run 200 mph or more was a three-point hydroplane.

 

THE WRIGHT BROTHERS. Just how long have you been living in that cave?

 

A few observations:

Amateur tend to be more innovative than professionals, in most cases through ignorance, and are as a class far less successful.

There are far more amateurs than professionals so the odds of achieving something new and remarkable are in their favor.

History and the media are far more likely to celebrate an amateur's remarkable achievement than that of a professional, from whom it is merely expected.

In any new field, such as heavier-than-air flight in the time of the Wright brothers, there are of course no professionals by definition. So all true innovations are inevitably created by amateurs.

. . .

Having said all that, I too like to recognize and celebrate the achievements of amateurs. It is probably more difficult these days for amateurs to succeed than in the time of the Wright brothers - which was considerably more than 20 years ago FWIIW. Great inventors often start by taking something that a few experts agree cannot be done and working at it for decades. With a few thousand such dedicated people trying the first of them to succeed is remembered for ever and the other thousands are forgotten. The expert who went on record as saying it could not be done is also - naturally - remembered forever. Effort, trial and error and ingenuity can produce something that works if it is at all possible with the technology of the day. Problem is, the technology of today requires a good education to put it to use.

There has also been a bit of a sea change in the attitude to innovation on the part of manufacturers. Whereas innovation from workers was once positively discouraged by bosses, now there are hordes of professionals working to advance the state of art in every field of endeavour. Amateurs have more competition than ever before.

But still, good luck to them all I says . . .

 

The wright brothers --who said that?

Sloppy posting!!!

The space shuttle was built by people who had never been in space , never been to the moon or wanted to. Never built a space ship before or seen one of that ilk.

Never built engines of that size to do that job.

Amazing amateurs.!

 

X-15

The shuttle aerodynamics were based on the hypersonic database from the X-15 spaceplane program. Rocketdyne had built engines for the Apollo program.

 

I don't think they got aerodynamics in space do they.

 

You could shoot a brick into space... getting it to fly back and land on the ground intact and reusable requires some expertise in high speed aerodynamics amongst other things.

 

I thought Mike Jones said "in the last 20 years"...

Your example is imho wrong. The Wright Brothers were part of an era where there were no professionals in the field of aeronautics. Everything was there to be discovered, and very little knowledge about the physics of flight existed and was available. They actually represented the excellence of knowledge and professionalism in the aviation of their time.

What would you do today, if you were an airline industry who has to invest into a new passenger airplane to beat the competition - would you call some uneducated though smart bunch like the Wright Brothers, or would you rely on a team of highly-trained aeronautical, mechanical, electronics etc. engineers for that task?

 

The Wright brothers were neither degreed scientists nor professional engineers, and did not work at an industrial laboratory.

 

You don't teleport into space. You have to get in and out of space.

 

Sorry for repeating it, but back in that time there were NO professionals (as we know them today) in the aviation. Yes, they were exactly what you said - just two self-taught, stubborn and industrious guys. Yet, they were the aeronautical excellence of their time.

I believe that the problem at the base of all this discussion is that we don't have an agreement about a clear definition of the word "professional".

 

actually the wright brothers had a lot of aerodynamic reashearch done by collage professors from around the world. the collage professors were the closest thing they had to "professional" aeronutical engineers at the time. the professors had collage funded reasearch facilities. the wright brothers built on this information and actually made something that was viable, there were others, including governement funded projects that were going on at the time. They were all in a race to see who can acheive controlled flight first, they were not operating in a vacuum and everyone was aware of the work the others were doing. What is remarkable about the wright brothers is they approached the problem very scientifically, self educated in the physics of aerodyanmic, built the first wind tunnel to test their foil shapes, and even built their own engine (even though Curtis made better engines for his motorcycles, Curtis too was trying to make a viable aircraft).

So even though the Wright brothers were "amateurs", they embodied everything the self taught professional would aspire to. There were "professionals" at the time, they were the ones that got government research money (and wasted most of it on bad ideas). But the Wright brother got the first contract from the military to build aircraft. Eventually Curtis built better aircraft, also self financed by his motorcycle company, and eventually put the Wright brothers out of business because their design became obsolete in only a few years.

 

When professionals go wrong

Below is an excellent article about how projects full of degreed professionals with tens of billions of dollars in government funding were total nonstarters.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-05zy.html

"...All of these vehicles were fantasy projects. They violated basic laws of physics and engineering. They were impossible with current technology, or any technology we can afford to develop on the timescale and budgets available to NASA. They were doomed attempts to avoid the Cold Equations of Spaceflight."

 

Real professionals

A good argument can be made that if the space tourist rocketplane projects such as Virgin Galactic were run by true professionals, they would realize they don't have remotely enough funding to do the amount of development and testing actually required to support the safety claims they are making.

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Rocket_Plane_Roulette_999.html

"The average rocketplane made only 29 flights in its lifetime before it was wrecked or retired due to wear...Are these safety statistics relevant to the 21st-century commercial operators? Probably not. These Cold War X-plane projects were lavishly funded and enjoyed top national priority. They were designed and operated by some of the best technical minds in the aerospace industry and consumed thousands of hours of wind-tunnel time before any metal was cut...Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites is the only established aerospace company working in this field. But SpaceShip1 suffered serious problems on all of its flights above 100km and was retired after only 3 such flights. Clearly Rutan didn't think that it was safe enough to fly passengers instead of sandbags - or even safe enough to make a few more proving flights to explore the economics of SpaceShip2."