"Corky Scott" wrote in message
...
After all, they're building hot rods and/or choppers, why does
anything have to be rushed about that?

Work pace drives total man-hours to complete. If they bid a fixed cost
contract (not sure if they do it that way), then "taking your sweet time"
eats profits.

Rushing ALWAYS causes problems.

Not true. But you gotta have the right people that can work fast and get it
done right the first time (well, most of the time). If you have some good
top-gun designers/fabricators, they are the only ones doing the special
jobs, the one-offs, and the prototypes.

It's kind of the opposite of the homebuilding aircraft ethic, to me.

Absolutely. The typical hobebuilder is not economically driven to complete
fast. In fact, slowing things down is probably economically better. Keep the
airplane in the garage. No hangar costs, no fuel costs, blah blah....

I work for Lockheed in Palmdale (Flight Controls engineer). I've worked on
some projects where there's no time, no money, and a next-to-impossible
design challenge. Imagine a crisis level like they typically show on
American Hot Rod, but sustained over a year or longer. The pressure to be
efficient and not waste a penny on idle time can be immense. Having one
person sitting around doing nothing cuz he's waiting for someone else to
finish his part is really bad, so you have to keep running around making
sure everyone stays busy at all times. Hissy fits and blow-ups are fairly
frequent. The thin-skinned typically don't survive. Those types, if they
stay with the company, end up working paper research projects (i.e. not on
prototyping efforts). Now, we typically don't have managers that scream at
employees (company rules DO mandate proper behavior to some degree), but
there are other ways to apply pressure.

So, from my perspective, I guess the drama looks about right. It never
occured to me that it was all fabricated, since I live it every day (at
least on my current project).

Kinda makes me wonder what it's like to work at Scaled Composites. Maybe I
should go ask some of my compadres that used to work there.

Pete