It's not Rocket Science

Life and work at Menasco was constantly busy, my inherited Fokker 100 issues, an avalanche of MRB work and a transition from the V22 Nose Landing Gear FSD to a fully redesigned EMD unit.

Douglas Rhoads of Boeing, an absolute crackerjack of an American character, had made my friends list of the time and we would speak about things we barely knew about, life, the universe and of course the evolving US Navy requirements for damage tolerance analysis. It was basically a philosophy of crack growth from an initial crack in the material and an assurance, or promise, that landing gear that had ballistic damage or an initial surface flaw from day one would still last a lifetime.

Whatever lifetime we had all dreamed up.

I would make an acquaintance, over the phone, with a chap called David Broek, and Menasco paid for his DTA package and some support, and in the following months, I really did need a lot of that support.

Gary Buss, a chap from the performance department, that group of people responsible for landing load predictions, fabricated a special hat for me during this time, a simple peaked hat with a battery operated propeller, and when the bosses were not looking, I would wear it with pride, because during my deliberations with Mister Broek, I truly believed that one day I would become a rocket scientist.

I could go on, and I often do, but the study of fatigue loads, their repetition within a spectrum, and the reasoning behind simplifying such a load history create such a fiction within the aerospace structural process that any faults in a subsequent analysis for damage tolerance could either mean absolutely everything, or nothing.

Yet, at a PDR (Preliminary Design Review) or a CDR (Critical Design Review) it was up to the analyst to justify every step in the process to the US Navy propeller heads, not only from the subcontractor or vendor, but also the prime analysts would stand up and vouch for elaborate benchmark processes of something that was, fundamentally mysterious and untestable.

The conversations with the expert, David Broek, as I wore my fancy cap, did little to reassure me that any of the work we would ever do could make our formal report worth any more than the paper that it was printed on.

Yet, it would be the future.