Musical Chairs Part Ducks

I believe it was the Challenger Tail Cone Tank internal loads report that I had to completely redo following one of the "killer tag" checking events, fortunately for me, I could do repeat stuff like that pretty fast so although it subtracted time from the schedule, I could work at "burst" mode to fix my stupid mistakes.

The error I had made was to reference ultimate loads with the limit loads rolling radius curves, so all the dimensions of compressed tires for the side load cases were incorrect, and incorrect in a bad way as the extra load produced more tire stroke which meant the internal loads were unconservative.

Regardless of me messing up that report initially, it was directly due to that experience on the Challenger aircraft that I was enlisted to work on derivatives of the Canadair Regional which was a similar aircraft but with different CG envelope and increased weights. The proposals for various new work came and went and I was busy on the F/A-18 NLG work when Dowty won the project for the next version of the aircraft, plus there was another proposal for the Global Express on the cards.

This was the start of an interesting six months at the tail end of 1993, as Jim Collins, who was our beloved Stress Office Manager, and good friend, retired from that position. Jim was always in his heart a job shopper, and even as the manager of the Stress Office (not the chief) he was quite a laid back individual and we would all enjoy his office banter.

It was sad to see him go.

The new project meant that Dowty needed bums on seats and there was such a huge influx of contractors that it presented a major problem in that busy time.

There were not enough seats for the required bums.

The nameless ones.

In the last post you will have seen me refer to "my boss" and not the person by name, well, the truth is that in the coming year or so of this account, people who know me will know who that particular "my boss" was, and that although he was a very good boss, he ended up doing something quite unforgiveable to me, so I won't be using his name.

I will also not be using someone elses name, who was actually an accomplice in the same future deed, and although I in particular agreed that all was forgiven with this secondary person many, many years afterwards, in fact, I never really did and merely "went with the flow" of circumstance.

It's just drama, and I think the blog is more about fun.

In 1991 when I returned to Dowty, I promised I would be back for at least two, perhaps three years as a permanent employee. I kept the promise and in the next few entries I will describe the set of events, which to me are quite comical, that led to me leaving once again for the realms of the job shopper world and of course, a much more lucrative career.