The requested meeting time this morning was the latest so far, but we had to be alert and ready to move earlier than other days. Our first activity of the day was learning the national dance of Chile, cueca. In my opinion, cueca was more difficult to learn than the basic salsa that we were taught earlier in the week. The actual steps are not hard, but the order of the steps and the patterns were somewhat confusing to me. Most of the class was taught in Spanish, but it was not hard to follow the instructions given. The fact that Chile has a national dance shows the importance of music and dancing in their culture. As far as I know, the United States does not have a national dance, and if we do it is not as important as cueca appears to be in Chile.
Today we went on our first company visit to LAN Airlines. The two company representatives, José (the person who presented yesterday) and his co-worker Luis explained many aspects of the company in great detail and showed us a few areas of the maintenance facility at the Santiago airport including the inside of a new Boeing 787. The 787 planes, which LAN is in the process of incorporating into their fleet, are beautiful. They are made of a composite material which is supposed to last much longer than the aluminum mixture that is used on older models of airplanes (40 years versus 20 years) and increase the amount of time between maintenance checks (6 years between major maintenance work versus 2 years). The improvement of these planes is a huge testament to the accomplishments of engineers working for airplane companies such as Boeing and Airbus. To me, 40 years seems like a really long time to be flying the same planes, and I wonder what implications this will have. For example, with the fact that newer planes will likely be developed during the lifetime of these planes, will they actually fly for the whole time that they can, or will airlines buy newer airplanes before this time to keep up with competitors and possibly new regulations. Regardless, the planes are the among the best technology existing at this time and will probably be considered nice planes for some time to come.
At LAN, we also learned some things about the maintenance process for planes and technologies that the airline is incorporating. Following many other companies, LAN has a commitment to sustainability. The planes in their fleet are equipped with winglets, vertical pieces added to the end of plane wings, to increase fuel efficiency and LAN has actually saved quite a bit of fuel with this small change. They also have a group that figures out ways to reduce fuel in the maintenance process such as reducing the time engines are idling and moving planes with small vehicles rather than using the jet engines when moving around on the ground.
Tonight, we were supposed to come back to the university for another dance lesson where we would have learned Reggaeton, but we got back to Viña del Mar too late and were unable to do so.
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