I see -- actually, the combination of `shape = (num_engines, ...)` and `dist={0:'b', 1:'n'}` will do it for you -- distarray will break up the array evenly according to rows, and since you already have one row per engine, it will work.

This happens to be a degenerate case where it doesn't matter if you use `'c'` or `'b'` in the 0th dimension, but I think `'b'` is less surprising here.