Today began with a visit to the VU University which is a beautiful but small campus situated within the city of Amsterdam. Again, I am a huge fan of the architecture used in the city around their campus, especially their gorgeous and expansive engineering building. The abundance of glass is beautiful and the big open feeling inside is refreshing. On the other hand, I do love and miss the industrial feel of Benedum in Pittsburgh and appreciate how efficiently that building makes use of precious city space. I also felt like the VU campus was somewhat lacking in green spaces and got the feel from our tour guides that it does not offer much housing space for its residents. All this makes me realize how happy I am to have wound up at the University of Pittsburgh which has lovely green spaces on campus, decent architecture and is a reasonable price. Talking about price, I was amazed by how cheap tuition is here in Amsterdam, only 3,000 euros for Dutch residents and 15,000 for international students. It would be great if the cost of college could be similarly priced in the US. Something I have to remind myself, though, is that starting salaries in the US are much greater than those here. So, as always, there are pros and cons to all countries and no place is the perfect place to live.

We then visited the Schiphol airport where we toured KLM’s aircraft maintenance and repair center. One thing that I consistently noticed during this visit is the enormous scale of their operation. The planes, buildings, and tools were unfathomably large, something that never failed to impress me. While the size of the plane was novel, I couldn’t help noticing similarities between the plane and the racecar that I work on in Pitt’s FSAE club. As Donald, our tour guide at Schiphol, told me more about the plane, it sounded more and more similar to a car. The way the sensors communicate is a technology similar to CAN used on a car and the wiring harnesses are constructed using similar tools as those used for wire harnesses in a car (the tools depicted in the image below). This is really interesting to me as it displays how when there exists a technology that works in one place, it often can be reused in other related devices. There are so many technologies that have already been invented so there is little reason to recreate something when a proven technology can be reused or repurposed.

Donald also discussed an important problem in computer engineering: when an engineer programs something, they design it only for how they intend it to be used. This means that when situations they did not anticipate arise, the code can break or not function as anticipated. In airplanes, this can be a huge issue so multiple different programs running on different computers are used to ensure that if one program fails, the rest can step in. This issue makes me realize that, when designing things, I must not only think about how it functions when used the way it is supposed to be but also how it works when used in other ways.

Finally, on the business side of things I learned about how choosing when to repair planes is a balancing act of safety and economics. KLM has a limited number of planes in their fleet so grounding one for repairs means they must find a replacement plane. If they are unable to find a replacement, they must cancel the flight and lose out on those customers. For non-critical issues, they therefore opt to fly the plane longer if possible. They must ensure that choosing to fly the plane will not harm the passengers or cause delays further down the line though. This displays the complexity of operating a business on this scale, having to make money while also do the right thing.

I have to mention the dinner tonight which was also very good. I always love couscous and the vegetable plate was very good. It was a healthy and light dinner yet surprisingly filled me up well.

The word of the day today is econoom which means economist because we listened in on a panel about capitalism tonight and one of the speakers was an economist. I do not wish to elaborate on this panel discussion as I was not convinced by the speakers’ arguments.