File one away. Part One.

The revised fatigue spectrum for the V-22 Nose landing Gear EMD had arrived on my desk from Doug Rhoads at Boeing and there was some confusion about the format of the load columns. It was early August in 1994 and the CDR was scheduled for the 14th September, so there was a fair bit of work to do for that presentation.

I called Doug and we chatted about the data, and what one particular column meant. I believe it was to do with the steering angle of the nose landing gear, so an additional step was required so that loads were broken out into their relative components before analysis. The fatigue analysis program at Menasco was almost identical to the one that it predated at Dowty, the difference being that the key documentation for all of the Menasco programs was kept in one book, in one bookcase, whereas at Dowty, every analyst had a relatively updated version of a book numbered S-1201

Doug Rhoads told me he would fax me the columns description, which he did, and the resulting couple of pages that arrived on my desk from Monique, our girl Friday, were comically extracted from the Dowty document.

In addition, a laugh out loud moment, the name on the top of the page for the person who had last updated those pages, was John Oh, a good friend, golfing and drinking buddy, who was still working at Dowty.

At Menasco, we all had our own phone on our desks, unlike the single phone system at the other place, so I decided as a joke to phone John up and have some fun.

I called and someone answered on a communal phone, I asked to talk to John and he answered and was happy to hear my voice. The next minute or so was comedy gold as I asked him to grab his copy of S-1201 and skip to the pages I had on my desk.

The conversation went something like this :

DW : "John, is that your name on the top of those pages?"

JO : "Yes?"

DW : "Then how the fuck did I, someone who works at the competition, get a copy of them from an American company, I thought it was supposed to be secret, have you been involved in some sort of industrial espionage?"

JO "....??"

There was a pause and then John realised I was having a laugh, the conversation continued for a few minutes of shooting the shit, he wanted to know how I was getting on at the new place and would I be playing golf with them at the Winchester Golf Club on Friday.

The call ended, and that was that, a bright moment on a dull morning...