Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
MichaelSalib · 2012-08-13
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This slide deck doesn't go into enough detail and I think the Arianne 501 section is not entirely correct; if you're interested in this topic, I enjoyed reading Space Systems Failures [1].
My spouse used to work as a EE in the aerospace industry and I collected some awesome stories from her. The degree of cultural pathology there is difficult for outsiders to comprehend.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Space-Systems-Failures-Disasters-Satel...
Your second paragraph sounds like a call for literate engineering, akin to Knuth's literate programming. I like this idea.
About CAD tools for aerospace, it really depends on what CAD tools you use. Things like Pro/E and Solidworks explicitly allow you to put in specifications and tolerances, and also for interference checking and the like. For electrical design, there are tools that allow you to put in electrical requirements and run simulations on your design files to test against those requirements. So there are some ways of catching problems ahead of production.
Now, those tools aren't available to everyone. So I'm on job #3 in this industry. Job #1 had me doing all my electrical designs in AutoCAD LT. No checking or simulations there (can't even generate a bill of materials with this either)! All we had was a library of symbols that one of the engineers had made. Job #2 had me using Cadence ORCAD, but without any of the add-ons that made it useful (could generate a BOM, but couldn't customize it, which meant that I was assigned to create an Excel macro to customize the BOM to meet our specific stock-keeping system's requirements). Job #3, I have nothing because all the vast majority of the electrical designs are done somewhere else (they use CATIA). Whenever I actually do some design work, I'm reduced to taking screenshots of relevant areas in other schematic PDFs, then stitching them together in MS Paint, and then pasting those into a Powerpoint template. I wish I were kidding.
But with job #3 most of my time is spent on other things besides pushing dots, like testing and evaluating upgrades to our embedded systems (this kind of thing is one reason why I spend time here).