Originally Posted by
tucumseh
....................... Health warning. Memory fades a little.
Blimey,
tuc, if this is your level of recall after "memory fade" and some 40 years in amongst all your many Projects you've PM'd that is scary! I hardly remember what day it is let alone what was happening all them years ago! I had no idea Blue Fox was so immature when we went South - OK, as others went South - I was having too much fun building/installing a load of UORs for those down there at the time to go myself! But what a fascinating insight/reminder of just how difficult it was to get anything into Service - it's a bit like the pitfalls faced by a salmon getting back to it's spawning ground - only the lucky survive!!
Pontius, I'm sure you'd agree the system was way off "just giving you something that worked" given some of the "interesting" decisions/characters involved along they way who often put a very different spin on requirements/tradeoffs which left normal RMs/Engineers going "WTF?????!!!!". Yep, them fish had one hell of a battle to get there!
As an aside, one thing I never did really grasp (having never been involved myself) were the advent of Software Support Cells so that some in-service development work (at lead Air Station level rather than the Malvern-type input you mention) could be carried out. I always wondered what this did to config control of such systems as I assume, if changes were made "in service", it would have to be via the SM route. I understood the desire was to do what
Pontius wanted but I always wondered how effective they were/are.
As an end-note, even today, when I see some amazing bit of kit whizzing around, setting off car alarms and generally flying amazing routines, it's not the aerodynamics which amaze me ..... it's just the fact it ever managed to get built in the first place which is the truly awesome thing to realise!
