one of the weirdest things I've ever seen a futurist noscope 30 years in advance: the passage about the applications of virtual reality to aircraft maintenance that appears out of nowhere in michael crichton's 1996 techno-thriller "airframe"
She spent the next ten minutes thumbing through thick Service Repair Manuals for the N-22, without any success. The manuals didn't mention the QAR, or at least she couldn't find any reference. But the manuals she kept in her office were her personal copies; Casey wasn't directly involved in maintenance, and she didn't have the latest versions. Most of the manuals dated back to her own arrival at the company; they were five years old.
That was when she noticed the Heads-Up Display, sitting on her desk. [...]
Korman liked to say that virtual reality was virtually useless, except for a few specialized applications. One was maintenance. Busy people working in technical environments, people who had their hands full, or covered in grease, didn't have the time or inclination to look through a thick manual. If you were thirty feet up in the air trying to repair a jet engine, you couldn't carry a stack of five-pound manuals around with you. So virtual displays were perfect for those situations. And Korman built one.
