Pilots learning by studying mistakes

Dave Stein took a break from writing about his core subject, building sales effectiveness, to discuss how pilots study the circumstances around crashes to learn what situations to be careful of. This kind of learning from mistakes can save one's life.

Dave is an experienced pilot. I don't think I knew that before reading the post. I like when people inject their personal passions into their blogs. I don't mean navel-gazing, but unveiling parts of their life experience that aren't visible in their professional profiles.

learning, mistakes, aviation

New version of "Flight of the Gossamer Condor"

A few months ago, I made mention of the passing of inventor Paul MacCready. Recently, I received this email from Ben Shedd, the director of "The Flight of the Gossamer Condor," the story of MacCready's efforts to create a human-powered aircraft. With his permission, I include it here (slightly edited).

I made the film THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR and it was great to find it mentioned in your blog. Paul MacCready's story has had a big impact on my life as well and I appreciated your comments.

For the 30th Anniversary of the Gossamer Condor's human-powered flight into aviation history, the film was remastered in HD and digitally restored from a preservation film print made by the Academy Film Archive. I would be glad to send you a preview copy of the DVD. In the past year, the film is now required in a national high school engineering program called PROJECT LEAD THE WAY and it is my hope that a whole new generation of teenagers will be inspired like you were to design and create their own inventions from seeing the Gossamer Condor's story.

Thanks, Ben, for writing, and for those interested in checking out the new 30th anniversary DVD, click here.

(Photo: MacCready's plane the Gossamer Albatross (the successor to the Gossamer Condor), courtesy of NASA)

innovation movies aviation

Boeing learns hard lessons about partner management

(UPDATE: 11 Dec 07 - Boeing confirms it's on schedule for first 787 flight in 1Q2008)

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that the trend toward collaborative product development would create a premium for partner-management skills rather than pure technical skills for innovators. Nowhere is this in bolder relief than in the Boeing 787 project, some of the travails of which are profiled in a front-page Wall Street Journal article today (link - $$).

What surprised me the most were the issues resulting from inadequate supplier management; specifically this:

"In addition to oversight, you need insight into what's actually going on in those factories," says Scott Carson, the president of Boeing's Commercial Airplanes unit. "Had we had adequate insight, we could have helped our suppliers understand the challenges."

And this:

But many [Boeing partners], instead of using their own engineers to do the design work, farmed out this key task to even-smaller companies. Some of those ended up overloading themselves with work from multiple 787 suppliers, Boeing says.

The company says it never intended for its suppliers to outsource key tasks such as engineering, but that the situation seemed manageable at the time. "We tended to say, 'They know how to run their businesses,'" says a Boeing executive familiar with the company's thinking.

As Boeing knows now, selecting a strategic partner and entrusting it with designing, building and delivering a critical subsystem is far different from sourcing a standard part from a supplier. The prime contractor has the right and obligation to critique, probe and view its partner's activities from the inside (you need Doubting Thomases).

In the short term, these delays hurt Boeing. There is PR impact. And financial hits, in the form of penalty payments and cash-flow delays. But it is important to remember that the 787 product will have a 30-year life cycle. By that count, a 6-month or even 1-year delay in deliveries will have a negligible long-term effect.

It's also good that Boeing is not trying to mask its mistakes and instead to discuss and learn from them. Not everyone agrees: the Journal article states, "Lessons that Boeing is learning the hard way could end up helping rival Airbus." This will be true to some extent--but the highly complex lessons Boeing is learning will be hard to glean from the outside. If Airbus gets too confident in its follower role, it will overlook its own inevitable mistakes and let Boeing get out even farther ahead.

(Photo: the 787 Dreamliner. Courtesy of Boeing)

alliances, partnerships, innovation, aviation, mistakes, project management, product development, Wall Street Journal

How significant is Boeing's 787 delay?

The Wall Street Journal reported today (link - $$) that Boeing has pushed back the launch of their 787 Dreamliner aircraft by six months, due to delays from partners supplying key subcomponents. Boeing's stock fell nearly 3% on the news.
But what's the long-term impact? Using the framework set out in "Reinventing Project Management," by Aaron Shenhar and Dov Dvir, we can evaluate the project and get an idea of the long-term cost of a schedule slip. (Here is a prior post on this book.)

"RPM" looks at projects over four dimensions: novelty, technology, complexity, and pace.

Novelty: on Shenhar and Dvir's scale of extension, platform, breakthrough, the Dreamliner project is a new platform.

Technology: on their scale of low-tech, medium-tech, high-tech and super-high-tech, Dreamliner is high-tech--using technologies proven in military applications in commercial aircraft for the first time.

Complexity: scale is assembly, system, array. Dreamliner is an array project (most new product developments are system projects, but given Dreamliner's unusual complexity--e.g., subcontractors work on their pieces across the world, then subassemblies are shipped for final assembly to the US inside 747 transport planes, I'd rate it an array project).

Pace: on scale of regular, fast/competitive, time-critical, blitz, the Dreamliner project is fast/competitive--typical of new product introductions.

The "RPM" map, then, would look like this.


Projects of array complexity in particular are subject to delays. As mentioned in the WSJ article, Boeing's extensive use of subcontractors lessens the control it has to respond to issues in the supply chain. (See this prior post for discussion about how outsourcing, regardless of its benefits, lessens direct control.)

But the Dreamliner will be a platform that contributes to Boeing's income for thirty years or more, if the 737 and 747 are any predictors. So on the face of it, a six-month delay is not significant.

What would be significant is if the project management approach that Boeing used differed from the needs of the project. As far as I can determine, Boeing knows what it's doing. The biggest risk would be to rush the plane out prematurely, in which case any operational problems would raise questions about the suitability of the entire platform. Paradoxically, announcing a delay should raise confidence in the project, as it demonstrates that Boeing won't put the plane in the air until it works.

So, a six-month delay is... embarrassing? yes. Costly? yes, in the short run. Long-run significant? No.

project management aviation alliances reading list Wall Street Journal

Farewell to a high-flying innovator

It was with sadness and a fair bit of nostalgia that I read of the death this week of Paul MacCready. I remember vividly watching the short film "The Flight of the Gossamer Condor" when I was a teenager. MacCready's quest, to design and build a human-powered aircraft, thrilled and inspired me.

He was one of the great innovators of the twentieth century. Through the combination of dreams and hard work, he created inventions of lasting significance, including solar-powered cars and airplanes, in addition to his human-powered craft, the Gossamer Condor and the Gossamer Albatross, the first human-powered airplane to fly across the English Channel.

And if you think that necessity is not the mother of invention, consider this, from the Wall Street Journal's obituary of Mr. MacCready:

When a new design he came up with for catamarans lost $100,000, he was determined to recoup his investors' losses. So he decided to vie for the Henry Kremer Prize, established by a British industrialist in 1959 for sustained human-powered flight. "The Kremer Prize, in which I'd had no interest, was just about equal to my debt," he told the authors of "Inventing Modern America" in 2003. "Suddenly human-powered flight seemed important."

innovation aviation obituaries Wall Street Journal