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People:
Keep 'em or Boot 'em?
By: M. Dreikorn
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The Army
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The
more you know the faster you go.
If
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| When we finally get back to the moon, it
will be on the Altair!
NASA has selected Altair
as the name of the lunar lander the Constellation Program
will use to put humans on the moon.
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| UAV's in the Field
When people think of
aircraft in Iraq, many imagine fighter jets and
helicopters, but many don't know about a smaller and
equally important aircraft in use today.
Flown by the UAV Soldiers of the 4th Brigade
Special Troops Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division, the
Shadow is a small and lightweight aircraft, coming in
at a little over 11 feet, with a gasoline engine that
can run for about four hours.
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STS-122 Still Waiting for the Green Light
Expedition 16 Flight Engineer Daniel
Tani, who is set to fly to the space station on the
STS-120 mission, will return home with the STS-122
crew. STS-122 will deliver European Space Agency
astronaut Léopold Eyharts to the complex.
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| Did you know that NASA has 15 launches
scheduled for 2008?
(Click here to view
the 2008 NASA launch schedule)
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01 January 2008
AS&D Quality, Safety and Regulatory
Newsletter
Your
source for professional connection
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The objective of this newsletter is to
provide perspective to the Aviation, Space, and
Defense (AS&D) industry on current and relevant
quality, safety, and regulatory matters in our
industry.
With that being said, The IPL Group wishes all of
its readers and friends and happy and healthy 2008! |
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People: Keep 'em or Boot
'em?
In this newsletter we have
been reporting on the growing challenges of an aging
workforce.
Presently, the average age of an AS&D
professional is somewhere around 59. That means that
the industry will realize an incredible sucking sound
of knowledge leaving the industry. And, without
people who know how to execute the processes of the
business you just might not have a business at all.
Here are a few things to keep in mind
while you ponder the people issues of your
organization.
Outsourcing of skill-based work is only
a short-term resolve - and possibly more costly than
you think.
But moving work outside of your organization,
short-term price benefits may be realized. However, the
medium to longer-term costs associated with
maintaining an external source can be much heavier
than thought.
The expenses of bring the source up to speed with
what good looks like, communication practices, and
then of course how to make deliveries on time are
frequently expenses which go unmeasured. Then there is
the on-going maintenance to sustain the process
performance.
And then, if things don't go the way as planned,
all of these costs may have to be realized again
when the work must be moved to another source; and
then possibly another.
With regards to knowledge, by the time the
organization realizes that they should have kept the
work in-house, they just may have a rude awakening. Since there was
no need to keep the machines and talent anymore after
out-sourcing, they may find that they don't have the
intellectual capital to perform the work themselves.
With regards to continuing to depend on
the existing people who are on the right side of the
aging bell curve, organizations are rolling the dice
to manage talent issues as people retire. This could be a
plausible course of action if there is a trained
talent pool waiting in the wings to replace the
outgoing talent.
But where is the ready-to-use talent going to come
from.
Domestic competition will be intense. Fewer young
people are going to be attracted to blue-collar jobs.
Importing people from other countries might be an
option, but why erode a domestic workforce? As a cost of
doing business, organizational leaders must understand
the value their people bring to the game and the
continuous investments which must be made to ensure
sustainable growth. Organizations
need to consider overlapping of positions to ensure
effective tacit knowledge transfer. By utilizing
those who are considered to have great process
knowledge as organizational greybeards, tacit
knowledge can be managed and transferred. The primary
responsibility of greybeards would be to ensure
younger personnel are developing the same level of
process excellence the organization and customers are
accustomed to.
Organizational leaders
also need to consider how truthful they are to
themselves and their employees when they speak of team
work and pulling together. The proposition
can not be one-sided. By nature,
people will have greater levels of trust and commitment
if they feel valued. One way to
create a greater sense of value, while maximizing
process capability it to establish methods for continued
professional growth of the membership. By providing
on-the-job learning as an integrated part of the
assigned work tasks keeps the employees engaged. The higher the
engagement the more focused people are on what they are
doing - resulting in improved quality and productivity.
However, the important point here is retention
and creating higher levels of employee value creation.
If organizations continue to use employees as a
commodity, then they will act like commodities and look
for other things to do.
The cost of getting an
employee to a level where they are in excess of 100%
efficiency differs from position to position and varies
depending on the complexity of product and process. But whatever
those numbers are, we must all recognize the conceptual
"learning curve" which must be overcome in order for the
organization to do really well. So, then why
wouldn't we want to keep the people we have and to grow
them into supper-performers?
I'll leave
it at that for this month. When we are
confronted with the challenges of losing our
intellectual capital, shall we send the responsibility
away; milk what we have and worry about it later; or
recognize the value of human capability and mange the
process to ensure long-term sustainable success?
Written by: M.J.
Dreikorn
The
IPL Group, LLC
(The IPL Group
provides comprehensive support in all areas of
performance culture development and sustainability of
intellectual capital.)
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 The following are news links
relevant to quality, safety, and regulatory matters in the
AS&D industry. These are events which have been
reported in the month of December. As a
professional, it's your responsibility to remain relevant.
Workforce Issues
Quebec faces a labour crunch in three
years and the problem is forecast to get worse, with
the Conference Board of Canada projecting a shortfall
of hundreds of thousands of workers by 2030.
Israel Defense
Forces soldiers with low military profile assessments
at the beginning of service are just as likely to
perform well under combat conditions as those with
high assessment scores, according to a recent Ground
Forces study.
Regulatory/Safety Issues
Opposing view: Safety project working
(USA)
In fiscal
2007, there were 24 serious runway incursions, down
from 31 the previous year. Of those, only eight
involved commercial aircraft. Since 2001, the number
of serious runway incursions is down by 55%, not up.
And in 2007 alone, with 61 million aircraft
operations, the risk of a serious runway incursion
involving any aircraft was slightly less than .00003%.
 At Orlando
International Airport, 41 certified air-traffic
controllers are staffing the control tower and radar
center -- far short of the 69 to 85 controllers who're
supposed to be working there.
A potential collision was prevented when a
veteran controller supervising the trainee ordered the
Southwest pilots to speed up their descent to avert
the business turboprop aircraft, according to Federal
Aviation Administration controllers.
The FAA said neither incident was a
"near-miss," but both violated the agency's
requirement that planes be at least five miles apart
horizontally and 1,000 feet vertically.
The runway incursion Wednesday night
involved an American Airlines plane arriving from
Mexico and a Mexicana Airlines plane preparing for
takeoff. The arriving plane, an MD-80 from San Jose
del Cabo, had just landed on the outer runway and was
about to cross the inner runway, where an Airbus A319
was about to take off for Morelia, Mexico.
FAA blunts
NASA safety data (USA)
Peggy
Gilligan, the FAA's deputy associate administrator for
aviation safety, said the NASA report is based on
anecdotal evidence, not the "hard data" the FAA
collects.
NASA yesterday released partial results of
a massive air-safety survey of airline pilots who
repeatedly complained about fatigue, problems with
air-traffic controllers, airport security, and the
layouts of runways and taxiways.
While your chances of dying in a horrible
airline accident are somewhat less certain than
winning the lottery, researchers say the little runway
mishaps that can ruin your day have more to do with
the number of planes in the air than bad decisions
made by pilots.
The
Federal Aviation Administration is doing a better job
of keeping to system acquisition budget and schedules,
but the agency needs to make a successful transition
to its Next Generation Air Transportation (NextGen)
system, according to a report by the Government
Accountability Office.
As aviation watchdog of this tiny country
between 2003 and 2005, Maimuna Taal-Ndure helped make
Africa's dangerous skies a little safer.
From January 1st 2008, the
procedures for the international air passengers'
health declaration in China will be simplified,
announced by China General Administration of Quality
Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) and the
General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC).
India and
China, which are projected to jointly control about 32
per cent of the world air traffic by 2012, "will have
to be in a position to think out-of-box and take the
lead in evolving new ground rules," International Air
Transport Association (IATA) chief Giovanni Bisignani
said.
The results of an $11.3 million national
survey of pilots will finally be released by NASA on
Monday, two months after federal officials said the
report could upset passenger confidence and damage
airline profits.
Powerful members of Congress from the
Northeast are saying they will oppose the appointment
unless Sturgell agrees to revisit plans for the
ongoing redesign of the region's congested airspace.
The nomination was scheduled for review last week but
now has been postponed until after the Congressional
recess.
 Air
China Ltd. Chairman Li Jiaxiang will step down to
become the state civil-aviation regulator, part of a
government plan for the chief of the most-profitable
Chinese carrier to boost the nation's airline
industry.
Australia's proud record of airline safety
is in jeopardy because the body overseeing the
nation's airways is not training enough controllers.
Controversial modifications to Sydney Airport's
runway safety areas would not be enough to prevent
catastrophic accidents caused when planes overshoot
runways, a global pilots' association has warned.
The UK is to dramatically increase the
number of ramp checks it makes on foreign aircraft -
to 600 in 2008 and 1,000 by 2009, compared with just
193 in 2006.
The ministry judged that it is necessary
to conduct its own safety guidance ahead of an
expected increase in the number of foreign airlines
serving this country.
Sri Lankan Airlines
okayed to train techies by EU (Sri Lanka)
The aviation safety agency of the European
Union has certified Sri Lankan Airlines to train
maintenance technicians.
Can Indian
airports handle rain? (India)
 While the aviation industry
continues to grow at a remarkable 30 per cent every
year, the questions nobody is asking are how seriously
is air safety being taken in India, and how capable
are the authorities to manage this growth?
The first
ARJ21-7000 reional jet, powered by a turbofan engine,
can carry 90 passengers with maximum range of 2000
nautical miles.
New travel rules
regarding lithium batteries (USA)
Spare lithium batteries -- meaning those
not installed in the devices they are intended to
support -- may not be packed in checked bags. Spare
batteries in carry-on baggage must remain in the
original packaging or be placed in plastic bags so
that leads are not exposed.
The very rule under which Air India got
the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA)'s
approval to maintain and repair its aircraft (and
other aircraft) stands to be scrapped on December 31.
 These are heady times for India's
fast-growing airline industry, which has been charting
roughly 25% growth for the last three years. Never
before have so many Indians found it so convenient and
so affordable to fly for work or leisure, thanks to
competition between a bevy of carriers like Air Deccan,
SpiceJet, Kingfisher, IndiGo and Go Air.
Airlines may have to put up their prices
after European ministers decided aviation should be
included in a radical project to cut pollution.
Strike action by air traffic controllers
in Suriname entered its second week on Friday, forcing
authorities to maintain a contingency plan including
modified and rescheduled arrival and departure times
in order to keep flight operations running.
Qantas and Airbus celebrated another major
milestone in the airframe manufacturer's relatively
short but successful existence - the delivery of its
5,000th aircraft. In other news, Airbus has
stepped up inspections on the vertical stabilizers on
about 400 of its oldest planes Greening the Fleet
(USA)
No longer a novelty, environmental concern
for air freight fleets worldwide is becoming
an
accepted part of the business.
Safety experts will examine Ozjet's maintenance
program after in-flight component failures on two of
its ageing Boeing 737s left half the carrier's fleet
grounded.
Maritime
Naval Facilities
Engineering Service Center (NAVFAC ESC) personnel are
working with the U. S. Marine Corps and private
industry to construct the Navy's first
compressed-hydrogen fueling station.
 New ships
don't come easily for the nation's Navy. While
commanding officers were celebrating the 20 years of
service for the nation's two Dutch-made Zwaardvis-class
diesel-electric submarines earlier this month, they
must have been hoping for speedy legislative approval
of a budget proposal for eight new US diesel-electric
submarines.
Defense
Civil defence plans discussed (UAE)
 Brigadier Al Matroushi stressed
the importance of discussing plans and what have been
achieved in 2007 with the spirit of joint
responsibility and according to quality standards.
Tantalum caps find
hi-rel niches (USA)
 These specialty-type capacitors
typically use higher-performance technologies,
enhanced manufacturing processes and/or unique
construction to deliver higher voltage, higher
capacitance/voltage (C/V) values, wider operating
temperature ranges and, in some cases, ultralow
equivalent series resistance (ESR).
Raiding
the Enemy's Mind (USA)
 Reading the mind of your enemy
may soon become easier. Computers may be able to do so
even better than humans, experiments conducted by the
Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA)
Real-time Adversarial Intelligence and Decision-making
(RAID) program suggest.
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AS&D
Events
The
following is a listing of upcoming events relevant to
the AS&D industry.
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This newsletter is brought to you by The IPL Group,
LLC. We hope you find the content informative
and useful. If there are other features of this
newsletter that you would like to see, let us know.
The power of our industry is not solely driven by
mechanical means, it is our intellectual base which
brings innovation and strength.
Sincerely,
Michael
Dreikorn
President The IPL
Group, LLC
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