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Old 13th Oct 2019, 23:18
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KelvinD
 
Join Date: May 2011
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It is interesting to note (or perhaps infer) from the Air Force notes that they probably have a better handle on ejector seat design and production than the company that invented them!
I once had some experience with Rockwell Collins (today's Collins Aerospace) when working with BA/Lockheed Aircraft in the 1970s. We were testing a new 10KW HF radio transmitter system Collins had designed and were building for installation in Saudi Arabia. I and one of the Collins field support staff were puzzled by certain failures and eventually found that a circuit board in one of the black boxes (they literally were black boxes!) had a signal output to another black box left the first box on Plug A, pin 1 and the receiving black box was expecting the input signal on Socket B, pin 2! When we called the design team's attention to this, they were obviously embarrassed and tried to pass it off with an excuse of "Aah. Well Team A worked on that box and Team B worked on the other box but it seems there was no Team working on testing them together". Let's see if that mentality has been fixed in the intervening 41 years!
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