PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Cocpit design requirements
View Single Post
Old 7th Dec 2010, 15:56
  #52 (permalink)  
John Farley

Do a Hover - it avoids G
 
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Chichester West Sussex UK
Age: 91
Posts: 2,206
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
glum

Good - that is what we like to hear!

There is a great career to be made as a specialist of course and these days many jobs in industry are done by teams of specialists. However one way to make yourself stand out from the other specialists in your area is to have a decent generalist education as well. Cranfield is one of the better places to get that so fill your boots.

In the flight test business teams of specialists can easily run into trouble if an event occurs in the air and the team managing that flight does not include the relevant specialist who can appreciate the implications of the event. This happened to me in the US where they have some of the best specialists in the world but are not so heavy in generalists.

When I asked for the sideslip limits on a .8M point I was doing (after the aircraft started to go very sideways) the test director said there was none and I should press on. I asked him to check with base - same answer. I refused to do any more and landed. As I climbed down the ladder I was met by an RAF Wing Commander UK observer who told me in no uncertain way I could not treat the US folk that way. As a UK alien when I entered the debrief room you could have cut the atmos with a knife. I used a loudspeaking telephone on the table to speak to the structural guy who had designed the back end he told me what the limit was - they checked the aircraft instrumentation and sure enough the point I had stopped at was right on the 80% fin strength line (beyond which you needed to use an instrumented fin)

Of course now the atmos changed totally and the specialists all wanted to know how I realised that we should stop when there was no trials paperwork that said so. I explained I had received a good generalist education in the business of aeroplanes.

Sorry you probably did not want to know all that
John Farley is offline