Extreme Budget Cuts: Laying Off Co-Pilots to Save Money

Could this be what the cockpit looks like 5 min before landing? Empty?
www.check-6.com (Great source for Aircraft photographs)

Our latest obsession these days in terms of business is budget cuts!

Managers and company 'wise-guys' have been coming up with great ways to save money. Some of these include not providing bottles of water at press conferences or press releases, universities that will not be named reverting to not allowing students to bring their own fridges to residence and even making senior business executives hit the road to their important business meetings instead of using the company jets. But this one particular business idea caught my eye.

Ryanair announced that they would like to eliminate the presence of the co-pilot on flights and train an air-hostess to land the aircraft in the event of an emergency; all to save operational costs. This comes after they already began forcing their passengers to do their 'bathroom business' prior to boarding a flight, which I admit was a reasonable decision, especially for short local flights.

What I'm quite curious about and would like to have clarified is the amount Ryanair would be willing to pay to train an air hostess to bring them to the level of qualification required of a pilot to land a 50-tonne, 200 seater, Boeing 737 aircraft safely.

I'll be watching their stocks closely this week to see which direction this idea would take them. Will investors applaud this as an innovative model and contribute accordingly? Or will Ryanair's passengers feel unhappy that profits appear to be placed ahead of their safety in terms of their carrier's priorities? Whichever will outweigh the other should show by the end of the week.

We should keep in mind though that the state-of-the art avionics that assist in the operation of most modern aircraft today have greatly assumed much of the standard roles of the pilot on a good day. But when it comes to an emergency, I'm sure a substantial number of passengers will want a second fully trained pilot controlling the clipper.

What do you think?

How much is too much when it comes to the cost of implementing library technology?

Photograph obtained from login-logout
www.login-logout.com

When it comes to implementing a new system designed to save an organization money, where is the line drawn in terms of implementation costs?

Let's take a library for example. At some point, somebody found that it would be a great idea to insert a bar code into the sleeve of every book. The advantages?

• Checking a book in and out of the library database takes seconds, no stamping is required.
• Keying in long book numbers or ISBN codes can be avoided.
• It's paperless. The stamp sheet's in the book sleeves no longer need to be replaced.

These advantages seem to be quite obvious and beneficial, especially from the counter operator's point of view.


A little later, RFID tags were also inserted in random locations within the books to improve loss and theft prevention. This is what causes the scanners at the front of a store to start beeping when you walk through the door without paying for your shopping.


But when you look at the advantages mentioned ,which may save the library the cost of a book here and there, how were these systems marketed to libraries that hold millions and millions of books? Implementing such systems require the library to pay someone to put tags and bar codes onto each and every single book.
Another thing to consider is the cost of each and every RFID tag which is at about $0.75. And in a library with about 4 million books, that is quite a cost to pay. It could take years for someone to steal enough books to create a loss surpassing the  a quarter the cost of the implementation of such a system.


Our company is currently working on a product for a client library that would reduce their running costs and man-power required to perform a similar repetitive task. It would utilize these tags that library's have already spent so much on to make the costs of their upgrades worthwhile.


Stay tuned to our 'Prototypes' page and you may get the chance to try out our system as part of our product development and improvement study. We'd also be happy to hear any comments or views on the implementation of new library systems.

Holographic Technology The Future of CAD?

Despite there not being a real demand or genuine advantage of utilizing holographic images, would it not be neat to be able to watch a soccer game on your living room table? And to be able to see what's going on from another perspective or view in the stadium by simply moving to another sofa in your living room?

After watching Jame's Cameron's Avatar in 3D, the true usefulness of the technology suddenly hit me.

Imagine how useful it would be when working on a CAD model in Pro Engineer Wildfire.
Once you have your assembly thrown together and you want to be able to twist and turn your design as if it were right in front of you.
Or what if you were starting off your design and had a general idea of how big your product was meant to be? With your hologram workstation you would be able to work at the true size of the object and not have to spend precious minutes dragging your drawing around the screen.

I truly believe Computer Aided Design  has a bright future ahead when it comes to Holographic technology and I would be one of the first people waiting in line to get my hands on it.

Philip Asante