C-17 Production Restart

[DWG]

I was thinking that if the US Congress approves the reopening of the C-17 production and gives it the needed funding if Boeing instead of just digging out the old engineering drawings for the production jigs and tooling would instead use advances in production technology including such as 3D-printing to create new and improved jigs and tooling?​

That assumes Boeing still have the appropriate engineering infrastructure and skills to make use of the plans (especially as they were McDAC plans). If the design was in CADAM, or CATIA CADAM, can you still read the files? And it's not just physical hardware that needs raising from the dead, but all the electronics that were and are used. And stuff like do you still understand the reasons things were done - were they recorded at the time in a change management system, and if the change management system was computerised (it was on our bits), can you still access the appropriate tools* to read that data?

* Probably proprietary/bespoke at that date, ours was.

Even if you can access everything, you face asking are the basic parts called for still available? Fasteners is a huge one - no fasteners to the original spec might mean reworking every rivet on the aircraft. Does everything still meet certification standards? Are the electronics reproducible? Is the software in the electronics still usable without change? If it isn't, do you have enough software engineers familiar with Jovial J73 to reverse-engineer it? And so on.

 

[Moose]

I was thinking that if the US Congress approves the reopening of the C-17 production and gives it the needed funding if Boeing instead of just digging out the old engineering drawings for the production jigs and tooling would instead use advances in production technology including such as 3D-printing to create new and improved jigs and tooling?​

Going to depend on a lot, not the least whether we're talking "C-17A Restart" or "C-17X."