Swinging Doors

November, 2007 :

The last post sort of indicates a mindset that I was in for the last few years of my working life, take that, along with the cynical rants and you can see that, even though I knew I was leaving the business, the business was affecting me deeply.

I don't think it's a complex subject, over time engineering had become a lot less fun because management stole it away from us all, the years of swashbuckling were over, replaced by a clipboard and schedule mentality and an insanity in the industry that turned individuals into resources.

Brendan from APPH emailed me to say that he was working on a job with a chap who spoke highly of me, this made me smile as I recall the man, one of a few remaining characters or "swashbucklers" that I had known in the industry.

I could make a list, but, Alan Marsden was (and still is) a great British draughtsman that I worked with when I was at Menasco between 1994 and late 1998. A gifted board worker who loved to talk about his adventures, definitely a bonus to have on any job, plus a lifeline back to reality of what it used to be about. It's a small world that's for sure and I realise that the aerospace game has been fun, the problem in the last few years, as a lot of us know, has been the infusion of daft practices that have nothing to do with getting landing gear out the door.

The advent of computer aided design and the so called "paperless office" over the last thirty years has shuffled most of the Marsdens out of the swinging doors, yet here is a chap who is still in demand in the industry, someone who can cut through all the bull and produce, on paper, a working design.

Alan would give me that sideways look, his face stern and deadpan. He would point at me and then ask "I hope you have used poissons ratio in your fatigue analysis" and we would both burst out laughing, a tiny comment from an event in his past that would sum up that most of the time, management did not know their arse from their elbow when it came to "what we did"