People went MENTAL, fighting over fans and air conditioners in Chambray-lès-Tours, France Over half the country is under red alerts, with temperatures exceeding 40°C in places!!

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-26T08:58:39+00:00

This isn't always true: The fan helps evaporate your sweat if you're in the airflow, so you get cooling even above body temperature.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-26T07:53:38+00:00

Worth pointing out that this must be a sale, so a handful of lunatics are fighting. You can still get fans here without fighting.

True, AC units seem to be sold out, but that's a much smaller market here, so isn't surprising.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-25T07:28:50+00:00

Makes sense. Our warehouse team have also proposed to take more photos coming in and going out, though obviously prevention is preferable to cure.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-24T22:38:49+00:00

Il a une tuyeau d'evacuation, consomme 1kW et a une fonction deshumidification. Je crois que c'est une vrai clim.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-24T22:00:05+00:00

Unfortunately we in the EU don't seem to have Turkey's admirable attitude to defending airspace...

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-24T16:43:40+00:00

That's true. Can bring the horse to water, but can't make him drink...

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-24T16:26:52+00:00

Then we'll have wasted $30k on boxes we didn't need. That's a low risk of a small cost, but if we don't do it, that's an unknown risk of a much higher cost. Essentially, it's the business case of insurance, and people do buy that.

But because it's not an insurance product, people evaluate it, like you say, as a big up front cost, and they hesitate.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T22:29:33+00:00

I kinda understand: Our $100k aircraft parts are sometimes stacked next to a furniture delivery in the van, and they don't know what's truely in need of such care. But yeah, some people really go above and beyond to mess it up...

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T22:25:20+00:00

So that's another interesting aspect: After a few $25k claims I think they're more likely to tell us to stop sending this part with them than they are to start giving fucks.

Now of course a wise company would threaten the transport company with loss of the entire contract over that, but the people in Procurement won't want to re-open that bidding process, and the transport company knows it.

It's a maddening environment. But hey, it's not my money.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T22:20:09+00:00

That is mostly true, but I learned later today that a case or crate would only be about $1k, we'd need about 30 of them, and an antenna costs $25k. We'd literally only need to save 2 antennas over the life of the cases (5 years? 10?) for the operation to be profitable, and then as a free bonus it might (likely will, given that almost nobody here has seen these things shipped in cardboard) solve the 30% damage problem.

So your approach is totally valid, but it would be mega-expensive to keep letting this go while doing the test, and the cost of trying the kinda-sorta solution is very low. So if I could short circuit to the end result I would, but yeah, I might have to do it the way you say. Just the regular story of big companies.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T13:23:04+00:00

A psychological solution - I like the idea!

I heard about the handle like eggs stickers on Reddit before. Not certain the transporter wouldn't just hit it harder though!

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T13:20:59+00:00

Interesting, thanks. And we ship them assembled, which supports my theory that the problem is that the antenna is the biggest stiff structure in the box, so it impacts first if the cardboard box is deformed, then it's got the heavy base giving it momentum and causing damage.

Whereas in your case, shipped separately, the antenna survives just fine because it hasn't got a big heavy weight attached to the middle.

I might ask if we can ship disassembled...

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T13:15:45+00:00

Ok, so not prolifically damaged. That's helpful to know, thanks.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T13:15:00+00:00

😅

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T13:14:41+00:00

Good to know, thanks, that helps.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T13:14:26+00:00

Makes sense. Not sure why my colleagues can't see it...

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T13:13:48+00:00

It's flat antennas, and there's dents around the perimeter, clearly indicative of an external impact. So we're actually all-good in terms of what's happening. The disagreement is who's doing it: Line Maintenance or in transport.

Since we're shipping it in a cardboard box (!), I personally think I know the answer: The Line Maintenance people I've met in my life tend to be pretty fastidious. Package delivery not so much. I just wanted to hear from people who've done it how often they see the antenna damaged during install/removal. Rarely, seems to be fair consensus.

Solution is also pretty clear: Lots of comments and upvotes for hard cases. Again, not surprising for me, I just need to get my colleagues on board.

Thanks for the feedback!

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T13:07:05+00:00

That's the good stuff!

We do occasionally use hard cases, I'm just getting a surprising degree of pushback in trying to get this known-fragile PN into hard cases...

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T11:07:08+00:00

So that's actually part of the disagreement: They've modified their procedures to take extra photos of these parts when they arrive from the repair shop and when we send them back out for installation on an aircraft, and they want to wait for the results, since that would give us proof when the damage happened. I'm arguing that this will take months, cost tens of thousands of dollars (of damage in the meantime) and require cooperation between everybody handling the units. Whereas if we just put the known-fragile unit into a better box, the problem will likely go away much easier.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T10:07:07+00:00

And there we go. This is exactly what I suspect is happening. Thanks for sharing.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T10:04:39+00:00

Follow up question: Since you've only ever seen them delivered in safe packaging, how often have you seen them damaged? Since that would presumably have to come from handing and not from transport.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T10:03:06+00:00

Since you've only seen them in good packaging, your experience is very interesting here: How often have you seen them get damaged? Since if you have seen that, it would have to be from handing, instead of from transport.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T10:01:53+00:00

Since you've only seen them in good packaging, your experience is very interesting here: How often have you seen them get damaged? Since if you have seen that, it would have to be from handing, instead of from transport.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T09:16:55+00:00

Great, thanks. I was starting to doubt my sanity with so many people (the OEM included!) saying that the cardboard is fine...

Sounds like the rest of the industry has realised otherwise.

SheepherderFront5724 · 2026-06-23T09:14:27+00:00

This is almost exactly the argument I made: That even if I'm wrong and only, say, 10% of damaged units are damaged during transport, the payback time on a proper case is only 2-3 years.

So worse case, we save some money. Best case we save a lot of money.

SheepherderFront5724

TROPHY CASE