Greatest ever blunder in the history of the UK aircraft industry?

[Modern Elmo]

Not long after my arrival, I was asked to see if I could find out why the turnover of workers from Scotland was much higher than from other countries. Talking to them I was told that what they found intolerable was being classified as "inefficient and bad workers" by German supervisors, for consistently taking longer to complete a task than others. What the Scottish lads were used to was "fettling to fit", while the standard practice at the Ruhr factory was to reject any part that needed such "fettling" and get a replacement, while also reporting the discrepancy for corrective action further up the supply chain. This, to the canny Scots, was a "shocking waste"


Compare to:

Eli Whitney

As early as 1798, Eli Whitney had turned his talents to the manufacture of firearms. He had established his machine shops at Whitneyville, near New Haven; and it was there that he worked out another achievement quite as [important] as the cotton gin: namely, the principle of standardization or interchangeable parts.

What is Standardization?


Standardization is the foundation of all large-scale production. Manufacturers produce separately many copies of every part of a complicated machine to use on an assembly line. Standardization also allowed owners of machines to order and replace any broken or lost parts, taking it for granted that the new part would fit easily and precisely into the place of the old.


Eli Whitney was one of the first manufacturers in the world to carry out standardization successfully in practice. Eli Whitney wrote that his objective was "to substitute correct and effective operations of machinery for that skill of the artist which is acquired only by long practice and experience," in order to make the same parts of different guns.
Eli Whitney went to Washington, taking with him ten pieces of each part of a musket. He exhibited these to the Secretary of War, as a succession of piles of different parts. Selecting indiscriminately from each of the piles, he put together ten muskets, an achievement which was looked on with amazement.

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Eli Whitney - Firearms and the Birth of Standardization