The year of Magical thinking.

It was true that the start of 1995 felt a little out of control in the Menasco engineering offices, and to make matters worse the edict had come down from the heavens that a photoelastic model of the new design of the V-22 Nose Landing Gear would not be created and that the FSD model should be sufficient.

There were a few sideways looks about this, and a multitude of questions and concerns in the trenches.

Larry told me that it was more of a schedule thing than anything to do with cost, that the logjam of drawings over the previous few months, and the focus on "small" drawings was the culprit, the large component drawings had been created too late for any lead time for the plastic model. It had been questioned, both through the vendor and the prime, if realistically any useful information could be obtained from the study late in the program.

I suspect in some ways, people in the engineering hierarchy believed that we were going to get this thing right the first time.

Hold that thought.

The pair of us knew that this could put us in a real pickle with the calculation of stress concentrations, mainly because the FSD design was very different for the main fitting component, the new design was not only a lot stiffer, but it also had some large features missing from the FSD, a much stiffer cruciform shape, and three large holes in the cylinder for the WOW switches.

I can recall a serious discussion with Larry, and he decreed that to mitigate our risk, we should consider a photostress coating in the areas of concern on the actual metal test item, and that this would serve  to provide stress concentration values in conjunction with strain gauge results.

Magical thinking.

This was given the green light by the powers that be, and we breathed a collective sigh of relief.