[orionblamblam]

>Aerospace is a small industry, so that data is still around,

Ummm... not too likely. Archives are fairly regularly purged... or not maintained. When companies merge, quite often archives are simply disappeared. Boeing is one of the few aerospace corporate archives worthy of the name. On the other hand, Northrop *used* to have a hell of an archive, as did Grumman. Then Northrop management changed, and they got rid of the archive. Then they acquired Grumman, and disposed of *their* archive.

Archives are legal liabilities. If you make a design error, or note a flaw, or somethign, and record it in an archive, and then ten years later a plane goes down because of that problem... someone might well find evidence that you knew of the flaw years ago, but didn't fix it... and sue you silly. Easier to just ditch the archive.

And then there's the fact that archives take up floorspace, and archivists are on the payroll.

[RightWhale]

archives take up floorspace

Not anymore. It's nothing but a rack of CD drives. Just another box in the server room. Granted, scanning from paper to image file is labor-intensive, but that can be contracted out, probably to Bangladesh or Moldova.

[demlosers]

Archives are legal liabilities. If you make a design error, or note a flaw, or somethign, and record it in an archive, and then ten years later a plane goes down because of that problem... someone might well find evidence that you knew of the flaw years ago, but didn't fix it... and sue you silly.

Another good reason for tort reform.