Question: what happens if you mess up on the engine

Masha Folk answered on 7 Nov 2016:

Great question!! It’s very important for an engineer to ask these kinds of questions at the beginning of any project and to think about them often. There are plenty of checks and tests to catch any mistakes in an engine. Have you ever built a complicated Lego kit? That’s an example of a system that is has checks lots of checks that you do to make sure you don’t mess up. If there’s a bad part, this will usually be very quickly noticed at the component level – way before the engine is even put together. If you have a bad Lego piece, it probably won’t fit with the other pieces and you would know before your model is complete. How do you know you’ve built the model correctly? Well you have to have a good set of instructions and follow them very carefully. You have to make sure there are no Lego pieces left over when you’re done (since that probably means you missed an important step). Finally, the engine is extensively tested on the ground (not on a flying airplane) to make sure everything is as you expect before it can go on a real airplane.