Back at Work

Why?

Lots of people are out of the office this week. Some are visiting customers, some are at the RAA Show, some are trying to burn vacation and catch a three day weekend. Very little is going on at the staff level. Just documenting what I did for the last three months and trying to develop a useless bottoms-up analysis of the government (read military) repair market for my company's equipment.

Bottoms up means count the worldwide inventory of aircraft by type, determine the avionics configuration, determine the MTBF of the equipments (per flight hour), dollarize that figure, then locate the flying hours per year for each type, then do a sumproduct on the whole thing. This is totally useless, since government only perform the repairs that they can afford. They all have huge inventories of spare LRUs and do not hestitate to cannabilize parked, stored, and retired aircraft. All of the services have big backlogs of unserviceable units waiting for funding. A proper market analysis would look at funding, not flying.

That is one reason I am retiring within the year.