Lesson's Learned from 30 years in Aerospace Engineering by Greg Morehouse

Editor's Notes

• #2: It’s hard to believe I’ve been working in Aerospace Engineering for 30 years!  But I have, and Motovated is based on many of the learnings from so many years in a very advanced industry.
• #3: In 1986 I was lucky enough take one of the first Graduate level Finite Element Analysis (FEA) courses offered in Arizona.  The instructor was a Mechanical Analyst from Ford, and he had amazing practical and theoretical nous.  He challenged us to really understand the strengths and weakness of this new Finite Element (FE) technology.
• #4: Which served me well in my first posting at Hercules Aerospace.  Our department was being hammered by the US Air Force on our tooling analyses.  They required FE validation of many of our assumptions, and I was the only one in the department trained to do it.  I was lucky enough to have a mentor in Hercules that knew more about structural analysis than Bill Gates knows about software.  He helped me understand how to validate our analyses even though he couldn’t run a computer.  So my first learnings in aerospace was “Understand your tools, know their strengths and limitations”, and “Be able to highlight to your client what you have confidence in, and where more work might not go amiss!”. Pegasus Rocket Motor Developed with Burt Rutan: * World's first privately developed space launch vehicle* Maiden 1990 mission marked the first all-new, unmanned space launch vehicle developed in the U.S. in more than 20 years* First winged vehicle to accelerate to eight times the speed of sound* First air-launched rocket to place satellites into orbit, using its carrier aircraft as an "air breathing reusable first stage"
• #5: When Boeing came head hunting for Analysts, I got swayed by big money and a title.  Tooling Analyst!  It’s what I’d been doing for three years so seemed only fair that I get the title and a raise.  But what I found at Boeing was a box in which I was constrained, unable to do my best work.  Instead of the loose framework I was allowed to work within in Hercules, which allowed me to be creative while ensuring the standards of our department and firm were met, I found at Boeing rigid structures within which I couldn’t do my best work.  The IT system was so shut down there were days when I couldn’t even work!  As engineers we were creative and tech savvy.  We could load specialist packages, like FEA, and tweak config files etc to allow multiple processors and page file sizes etc., to double or triple the speed of our FE installations.  Yet the IT department had so locked down our permissions that we had to just put up with poor or inadequate performance.  That feeling was endemic in the organisation.  That even if there was a better way, we wouldn’t use it.  We did it the Boeing way.  From restricting me to only analysis, when my passion was using analysis in the design process, to forcing us to throw our designs over the fence and let someone else deal with the fabrications issues etc
• #6: At Boeing I learned to “Enable Design Engineers to engineer all the way through the products lifecycle” and “The power of frameworks versus constraints in enabling an engineer’s best work”.  Can we get the bought out items in the parts list?  Are the tolerances cost effective to manufacture?  Has enough analysis been done to ensure functionality through the life of the design, and to ensure the people aren’t harmed in the process?  These are all considerations which are best thought of and managed up front in the design process.  But at Boeing they always seemed like someone else’s problem, and the solutions to these problems were very inefficient. I also learned that even if you do things inefficiently, you can “Train people extensively”.  Which helps!  And if you have enough checks and balances, you can still get an amazing product out of the process.  I’d still rather fly Boeing than any other manufacturer.  They “double check and test” with the best of them!
• #7: In PDS Engineering I had another amazing mentor in one of my best mates, Brian Holmes.  Brian wasn’t my boss initially but he and I did everything in PDS, from estimating the jobs to concepting, modelling, drawings, design verification (analysis) and commissioning our designs in Boeing.  He was head of the Analysis department, and I was just a Tooling Engineer.  We were at completely different places in the organisation, but completely aligned on what it took to create amazing engineering.  He had developed all of our processes in MathCAD, and my affinity for it and my skill in analysis meant that he asked me to replace him when he went on to management.  I took the processes he introduced me to and developed them to an amazingly efficient design document in Motovated.  From Brian I learned that both the creativity of Hercules and the rigour of Boeing was possible within the correct framework.  “Good engineers do amazing engineering with the correct systems” was what I took from Brian and PDS Engineering.
• #8: How to balance the tension between wanting to do things “the Airbus way” but with limited resources and data?   How to get through a huge analysis programme of work without getting bogged down (paralysis by analysis) or starting “science projects”? A “Minimum Viable Simulation  (MVS)™ approach was developed where, components were initially analysed and reported in a simplistic, but fast manner. If the part failed and required more detailed analysis, this was delayed until all components were analysed. The analysis programme of work was then reprioritised and another round undertaken which also allowed for updated designs and load data etc. to be considered. This “minimising batch size” technique prevented the typical “death spirals” where a huge investment of time is sunk into a particular component which may not make it into the final design anyway.   Another issue was varying conservancy between analysts – i.e. the quality was operator dependent. If you ask an analysts to undertake a “back of the envelope” calculation, you need to provide clear method for them to apply caveats for physiological safety. Lists of assumptions and limitations can easily be thought of as “unnecessary detail” in top level reports etc and analysts can feel they haven’t been heard. For the fatigue lives of components we provided two results in all reports to overcome this; the calculated life value and the recommended life value. In the later, the analysts could apply factors to “knock down” the life e.g. apply their own safety factors. If there was a large difference between the values, it was obvious that there was a lot of uncertainty with the result and further work likely required.   We have developed a tool chest of similar techniques we collectively refer to as our “Better By Analysis” methodology. The techniques mentioned above and others did make a real impact on both the quality and quantity of work output by the substantiation department.
• #9: At Motovated we’ve analysed close to a thousand products, and engineered hundreds of them.  Most weren’t for the aerospace industry however, so we’ve had the privilege of working in many specialist engineering industries, learning their standards, processes and smart ways of looking at things.  We’ve expanded our knowledge in extensible ways, so new engineers in Motovated get the benefit of that knowledge.  To sum up: Understand your tools, know their strengths and limitations Be able to highlight to your client what you have confidence in, and where more work might not go amiss! Enable Design Engineers to engineer all the way through the products lifecycle The power of frameworks, versus constraints, in enabling an engineer’s best work Train people extensively Double check and test Good engineers do amazing engineering with the correct systems Verify and test via Minimum Viable Simulation and Minimum Viable Product processes