An Airline’s Impossible Dream

The Delta MD11 was inbound from Atlanta to Portland, on its way to an ultimate destination in Narita, Japan. It was supposed to land at PDX, refuel, board connecting passengers and take off for Narita. Instead, the Delta pilots refused to continue, effectively grounding the plane halfway through its journey and stranding a couple hundred passengers in Portland for the night. Why did they refuse to fly? They said it was a rest and safety issue – the pilot crew rest on the MD11 did not provide a quiet or comfortable environment for sleep, thereby causing potentially dangerous fatigue for the flight crew. And they were right.

By landing in Portland and refusing to fly they made the problem a pilot union issue that could ultimately result in a strike with the potential of grounding every Delta Air Lines flight and costing the airline hundreds of millions of dollars. Not being a scenario Delta wanted to entertain, they immediately asked a few specialist companies for bids to design a new crew rest. We were one of those companies. We had both the advantage and disadvantage of being the company that had built the first crew rest. It wasn’t our design; we were only the builders. But, the idea we had built an inferior crew rest was ingrained in the customer, so they chose a company who had never done a project like this before.

There was an edict from the union demanding a new crew rest in nine months or they would strike. The heat was on. The new company spent five months working feverishly to produce a new unit. They met the preliminary and critical design review milestones and built a first article for inspection and buyoff by Delta. That’s when reality struck. Upon inspection, Delta realized they had made a terrible mistake – the company they had chosen was never going to be able to produce a unit of the quality they needed to avert a strike. They decided to give us another call….

I was summoned into a meeting and told to drop everything and ready a quote for the Delta job we thought we had lost. We had a phone call with Delta. They wanted us to take the job from the first company and finish it. They said, “If you get this done on time we will love you forever and if you don’t you’ll never get another job from us.” Hmm. Of course we said, “Yes.”

I was put in charge of the crazy project. I told them I would only do it on one condition – I got to hand pick every engineer on the project. After another two weeks of negotiating work scope, pricing and delivery, we only had 14 weeks to design, build, install and have the FAA approve our new crew rest. We started by working backwards; I figured out the hours needed to create a design, then took the delivery date, backed out 4 weeks for manufacturing and figured out how many engineers we would need just to burn those hours in the allotted time. To have a chance at making the delivery date, we needed to begin producing manufacturing tooling and parts before the design was even close to completion. I calculated we would need 24 engineers working 80 hours/week for all 14 weeks just to burn the required hours, much less to do that efficiently. Then there was the matter of designing, finding, purchasing and building all of the parts. Normal lead times for parts range from 4-24 weeks on such a project. That obviously wasn’t going to work. We were going to have to compress those leadtimes as much as humanly possible and get creative with how we solved a multitude of design problems. Any normal person would question how this was this even remotely possible. We didn’t know the answer either.

Having seen the first article company one had produced, I seriously doubted any of their design would be useful to us. But we had to placate the customer and they wanted us to use it. And company one, wanting to save face, kept insisting most of it was useful. Politics just never cease to be part of a project no matter how desperate things are. In fact, usually the more desperate things are the more politics come into play to screw things up.

Anyway, we looked it over. It was a mess. No part of it was useful. In fact, we found it was even the wrong size! It was too large for the allowed envelope and wouldn’t even fit through the door to get it into the airplane. Despite all that, company one kept insisting it was good. Why were they even still in the picture? It was a distraction that was costing us time, and me my patience.

Before our Initial Technical Coordination Meeting with Delta I worked 36 hours straight so I could present a plan. At one point during this project I worked 132 hours in one week, averaging 19 hours a day. In those weeks we invented a new passive noise attenuation composite panel that reduced transient noise from over 90 decibels to less than 70. The panel was only 1 inch thick and formed the structural shell of the unit. When we found the original unit wouldn’t fit in the airplane, we re-designed the whole thing from scratch and completely re-designed the interface with the cockpit door. Once in flight, the crew rest was supposed to extend in front of the forward left-hand entry door, effectively doubling its size. This required us to devise a new slide and lock system using off the shelf parts. After that, we had to figure out a quiet heating system with air taken from a 10″ diameter duct blasting over 300 cubic feet of air per minute. This noisy duct was only an inch from our crew rest wall. Trying to bleed air off that and neck it down to only 8-10 cubic feet per minute and keep it quiet was nearly impossible. In the beginning, the whole thing sounded like one big oxymoron. But one by one, and often concurrently, we attacked each design issue and integrated it into the whole.

Some motivation was added when our President incentivized our VP of Sales and myself by dangling $20,000 bonuses (in today’s dollars) in front of us if we managed to deliver on time. We were skeptical he’d follow through. Still, it was out there.

The interesting part of this whole project is we never considered failure. No matter the problem or obstacle, we simply kept plugging away solving each problem as it popped up. If it started to slow us down, we merely worked harder and longer. There was no way we weren’t going to succeed. It helped that we all worked well together and that I kept our purchasing manager totally up on things. I spent a good part of my time running around from department to department keeping everybody up on what we needed or what we were trying to accomplish and how they could help or what engineering needed to change so we could get parts. This time that old saying of “you can have it better, cheaper, or faster; which two out of the three do you want?” was easy – faster and cheaper.

I also became mindful of another old adage in aerospace – “there comes a time in every project where you have to shoot the engineers and start production.” Engineers will fiddle and fiddle with something to try and make it perfect. I learned an interesting thing about the cost of perfection when I as a twenty-something I became interested in high-end stereo equipment. The first 80% of sound reproduction quality is relatively cheap and easy to achieve, but any incremental improvement beyond that becomes increasingly expensive to attain. In other words, each improvement costs more than the last, becoming more and more expensive until perfection becomes infinitely expensive. That concept lends itself nicely to another engineering expression: “Given enough time and money, anything is possible.”

I used that concept of performance as inversely proportional to expense to guide all of our engineering projects, especially those on a tight timeline. And once again, it was fascinating to see how the dots, the experiences, of one’s life connect.

In Engineering, I kept a close pulse on what our people were doing. We had some strong engineers; old hands with great experience, brilliant young guys who could pick up concepts and go with ideas, and others who would do anything asked of them. With this mix of people I was able to divvy up the project into manageable parts and cut those groups loose. We immediately started by identifying design approaches and specifying raw materials to put on order and support timely production. Every decision was a calculated risk, and mitigating those was necessarily a standard part of the design process to make sure we had an avenue to success. It started by developing an outline of the noise reduction panel needed to make the crew rest quiet enough to satisfy the pilots. Fortunately, I had hired an aerospace engineer who also had noise attenuation experience for this part of the process. In the end we finalized a panel design, tested it and proofed a production process for it in about three weeks. Everyone was jumping. The energy and stamina was incredible.

The next tough problem was necking that HVAC duct down. The unit required auxiliary heating because we were drawing from the main cold air duct. We were worried about the noise and though we were confident of our tests, we still held our breath when we were in Greensboro, NC for in-flight noise testing. Simulations are great, but that is all they are. The real proof is in the puddin’. The serious space constraints had challenged our ability to design quiet and effective ducting, as did the need to choke the 300 cfm down to the 8-10 cfm required in the sleeping bunks.

The one place we had a real problem was electrical systems design. Electrical engineers were in short supply. Temporary engineers placed through job shops were rarely interviewed, typically being accepted only by resume. I finally hired a contract EE hoping he could do the job. He was quiet and unassuming, but he also turned out to be irritatingly ignorant. When he spoke, it was barely above a whisper. More off-putting yet was his preferred method of laying out electrical schematics by sketching them on Post-Its. And despite his seemingly demure exterior, he was exceedingly stubborn. That combination made him nearly impossible to work with and drove Ted, our senior engineer, crazy to put it mildly. There was more than one occasion Ted asked for a conference room just to scream at this guy. If anyone could get him to conform it was Ted. Unfortunately, all we got was four weeks of frustration until I was able to hire another contract EE. It turned out, however, the second guy was almost as crazy as the first. Worse yet, they knew each other.

Our second EE showed up with an obvious ego and a chip on his shoulder. I didn’t consider it a deal breaker at the time, because most engineers, especially EEs, had personality quirks of some kind. But it quickly got worse.

Because we had no more room in our annex, he was given a desk upstairs in the main engineering office. It took less than 30 minutes for him to appear at my desk, whereupon he elbowed his way in front of six other people with design issues. He glared at me and interrupted with, “I want a phone on my desk.”

“The phone system has no more capacity to add phones. You’ll have to share a phone with the engineer next to you,” I replied.

He puffed up his chest, took on an intimidating stare, and said, “Either I get a phone on my desk or I quit.”

I stood up and stared back, silently taking a good ten seconds to decide if I was just going to deck this asshole and fire him right there. Finally I said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

He left. Everyone could tell I was pissed. Immediately I phoned our VP of Engineering and asked for permission to fire the guy. “I know we’re desperate for help in electrical design, Joe, but this guy is not going to work out.”

“Fine,” said Joe. “Do what you have to. Just get the job done.”

Then I called the IT department and asked if they could put a phone on the guy’s desk. It turned out they had one more phone left and would install it in a few hours. Next, I called the job shop. “Suzette, I know this guy is technically your employee and you should be the one to fire him. So, although I would really like to be able to tell him, I think it’s more appropriate coming from you. Can you call and tell him we no longer want his services?”

“I will. And yes, you’re right we should be the ones to tell him,” she said.

“Thank you. How soon can your people get that done?”

“We have a few other things to accomplish, but it should happen before lunch.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

A couple of hours later a phone was on his desk. It didn’t take but a few minutes for him to get his first call. “Pack up your things, you’re fired, effective immediately,” the voice on the other end said. Yes! We all got a big laugh when we heard that. It was poetic justice at its finest.

Along with the ducting, Ted and one of our hotshots, Warren, ended up doing most of the electrical wire routing, too. To finish the schematics and reports, I was able to beg and cajole one of the electrical engineers from another group to help us. What a pain in the ass.

The last big hurdle was the slide and lock system we had to re-invent. The old system was hard to use and sometimes jammed when it was deployed or stowed – not a good thing when it was blocking the plane’s main entry door. We ended up using a beefy three rail, multi-plane system that was really smooth. It still boggles my mind we were able to find and procure all this stuff in time. With those 4-26 week leadtimes, on something with as crazy-short a design/delivery time as this project, we had to get lucky.

Lucky is an interesting word. I have always believed luck is preparation meeting opportunity. I don’t care what anyone says, luck is rarely ever blind. It’s invariably backed by calculated options and experiences before opportunities present themselves. So in this world of quantum possibilities, an informed choice automatically increases the odds of success. The old saying ‘the harder I work the luckier I get’ appears true – more opportunities present themselves to people who are always scratching for them, putting themselves out there, out in the edge.

There were still moments when we were holding our breath. When we tried to install the first unit in a plane at Greensboro, NC, it didn’t fit. After some detective work and some hushed talking between us on the plane, we found a couple of deviations from standard aircraft configuration we were able to work around, but boy, it was close. We were literally a couple of hours from missing the installation milestone and sending everyone from the CEO of Delta to the pilot’s union into a fatal tailspin of canceled flights and a strike.

I believe we were blessed, but I also think it had to do with our attitude. We didn’t stop trying. We were wrong a lot, bet we never stopped trying. We couldn’t fail if we didn’t give up. I remain very proud of this project and the people who worked on it with me. Really no one thought we could do it. Delta was also that desperate – they had no choice but to let us try. It’s amazing what happens when you don’t give up.

For me, this project also brought home the power of visualization. I’m a believer, but it has never been particularly easy to keep the faith. It’s a consistent, conscious struggle to keep believing that how I imagine and visualize the world dictates the actions I take to create and manifest things. Through this project I came to realize I was my own creator, and how I empowered myself to act either made my imagined world real or impossible to ever become. And I think that is what we are about – becoming. We are always on our way to becoming something more than we were yesterday. Life has always been a journey about becoming something, about knowing more today than yesterday; about adding to our understanding. I have noticed epiphanies sometimes come in bunches if I remain open to them. It means I have to step above the weeds and the chaos, and calmly look down from the clouds to keep an eye on the big picture. I believe great leaders know the details but sublimate them to the big picture in order to make the right long-term decisions. They stay true to the vision because they have an unfailing belief. It doesn’t mean the plan can’t change, but the vision needs to remain true.

I think everyone’s power to act upon a vision is open-ended; that it can manifest either exciting and positive thoughts or fearful and negative ones. I try to condition myself to find a positive outcome, even when the problems seem overwhelming. I’ve always had a natural inclination that way, but it takes work. You’ve heard it before – problems are simply opportunities to find solutions – but it’s true.

Many successful people believe persistence is one of the most important attributes of a leader. In that vein, there is an adage I’ve always tried to remember: you can never fail if you don’t quit. There is always a solution and I’m not the only one who can help find the answer. Good leaders use all of their resources, especially all of their people, to find solutions. Knowing there is always someone who can help means knowing you’re never alone. No matter who you are that is a powerful thought.

So when you look at that next crazy project or idea, ask yourself – am I willing to invest what it will take to get there? That will tell you if you can or you can’t.