Manpower for instrumentfor instrument

I had to a chance to experience the effect of the ‘laws of diminishing returns in my service life while in the Air Force. I was working as the operations manager in the aircraft system calibration laboratory, two years ago. We had a production plan in place for a daily, monthly and yearly basis. We had specially trained manpower for instrument and electrical labs. Those people were highly experienced and were masters in their area of work. For instrument there were 10 workers and for electrical lab we had 6 people. The incident occurred in the instrument lab.

The daily task for the instrument lab was 20 productions (calibrating aircraft testers). There were total 04 calibration benches available and all were serviceable. The men were neatly following this plan and were able to accommodate their personal needs like leave etc within the production plan. Then, an emergency situation occurred where we were required to produce double the number of calibrated testers, to meet an assignment abroad. The lab crew was augmented with the crew from the electrical lab who had some experience in the instrument calibration. 

Read about negotiable and nonnegotiable instruments

We continued this for a week and we were somehow meeting the requirements. There came another demand the next week and this time the average production demand shot up to 50 per day. Now the calibration benches started showing signs of overuse. The readings become erratic. We had no extra calibration benches. The men tried to rectify them. This has again robbed them of the valuable time. At the same time they were losing their energy and they were at lowest ebb of their patience.

They started feeling the fatigue of the continuous work they were doing for the last two weeks. No extra man power was available even if we had extra calibration benches. The benches broke down frequently, the men fell ill and on the third week the daily production came to an abysmal 05 per day which made the whole story even worse. It took almost a month for us to regain our energy and repair the calibration benches.

2. My experience with the remotes sensing is the use of online satellite images provided by the Google earth.

I have used these images to plan my family vacation trip to the Indian capital, New Delhi, last summer. The map was extremely useful and I was able to plan our movements and stay in a precise manner as the important locations and the roads leading to them were very clearly visible in the map. Such a facility was not available to the common man a few years ago and this site has immense utility in the area of education and tourism. Some of the benefits of remote sensing in measuring the forest resources are listed below.

(a) The forest resources like the animal inhabitants, the type of trees, available water resources, information about the ecosystem are all can be obtained

(b) The exact geographical make of the area can be ascertained

(c) The available habitats of the inmates of the forest and information about the adjacent human habitats which may affect the sustainability of the forest area can be found out

The general advantages of the remote sensing are listed below.

(a) It can provide up to date data on the resources faster than any conventional methods

(b) Inaccessible regions like mountain tops and continents like Antarctica can be mapped easily

(c) Large area can be viewed in a single frame

(d) As the satellite images are digital in nature, data collection and manipulation using the computer is very easy.

The disadvantages:

(a) The data is not 100% accurate. There is a approximately an error about 10%

(b) They need geometrical corrections with reference to the existing and more accurate maps

(c) Details of the satellite imagery is somewhat coarse and sometimes inadequate.

References: zwww. enotes. com http://www. abdn. ac. uk