Originally Posted by Shawn Coyle
. . . .(that was over 20 years ago, but watching the folks at Mirabel as recently as 3 years ago, it hadn't changed much). I also watched it being done at Agusta in the US and in Italy. . . . .
Mr Coyle: I would really appreciate the chance to learn more about your exp. in Italy (and those of other pilots, FE's or FTE's who've worked over here). Please contact me at
[email protected]
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That's my point! Or a part of it, anyway. Bell had a significant head start in the VTOL/tilt-rotor domain, and they blew it. In the mid-70's, several prominent engineers made a good case for the quad tilt-rotor vs. a twin rotor (agility, safety, c.g. range, no self-induced IFR) but
somehow the V-22 prototype wound up with just two. It would be too easy to point the finger at the various company and DoD PM's. One of the guys I worked with at Edwards AFB explained it this way: in many cases, the ball starts rolling in a certain direction, despite the lack of a significant body of technical, financial or market data. As the ball rolls, it accumulates mass. In a matter of weeks, there are a hundred or two hundred people assigned to the program. Once it's large enough to appear on the radar scope at corporate, it starts getting managed, and at that point, its rolling too fast to stop it.
In 1991, I presented a fairly solid argument for increasing the area of the Eurofighter's foreplane by 7%, and calculated that it would cost the program $2M. A couple weeks later, they told me that the overall impact would be over $200M, and a delay of up to 15 months. So if the age-old art of "going back to the drawing board" is no longer an option, then we'd better make sure that the guys doing the conceptual and early trade studies have an extra-sharp set of pencils. And much more importantly, we have to make sure that they have ample time and money to drive around the neighborhood, and see what the backyard mechanics are up to. I am not easily impressed, but the other day, a 40-man design firm operating out of a run-down building blew me away with their work in swarm technology.
The term "innovation" is used alot these days; where I come from, "innovative" means that you found a feasible solution to the problem in a just a few days, using very limited resources. At McDonnell Douglas and at Lockheed, the company culture stifles most of the true innovators. The situation is twice as bad at Airbus, and ten times worse at Agusta.
The production sites of Bell, Boeing, Agusta, and Airbus have one thing in common: the percentage of Toyota's in the parking lot.
One colleague tells me that on the Toyota Camry, between '96 and 2002, they managed to cut in half the number of hours spent in post-Final Assembly testing.
What needs to happen, in industry or in govt, before companies listen as much to their senior pilots and engineers, as they do to their financial people? Before the engineers are given the freedom to contract directly with the smaller shops?
(btw, can anyone suggest a more appropriate forum?)