Some of the greatest innovative designers in aerospace history like Barnes Wallis and Sidney Camm, father of the P. 1154 Harrier STOVL in Britain, and the legendary Clarence Kelly, father of the entire Lockheed Martin "Skunk Works" in the United States, performed some of their best and most visionary work at advanced ages.
Other countries venerate age and experience in industrial management far more than major U.S. corporations do — most strikingly Japan, which remains the most successful industry-exporting nation in the world with a record of quality control in its exports — including those produced at its companies' U.S. plants with 100 percent American workforces.
It is also striking that among the many areas where U.S. corporations like Boeing and Lockheed Martin continue to perform superbly is on programs they have been operating for decades, or where they have been steadily maintaining and upgrading technologies on systems, using workforces and managements that have been allowed to pass on their accumulated experience and expertise to their successors.
Boeing's superlative, world-beating airliners, through the 777 and the Dreamliner, are clear, evolutionary successors and developments on the basic design of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet that made its first flight in December 1947. Even before the B-47, Boeing had led the world in pioneering high altitude, fast, pressurized cabin strategic bombers with its B-20 Superfortress through World War II. Thus, one of America's most important commanding leads in profitable, export-oriented advanced technology in the 21st century is based on a line of accumulated, retained engineering, development and design stretching back more than 60 years.
Similarly, Lockheed's expertise in developing high altitude and satellite surveillance systems also predates the Space Age. It was also producing Clarence Kelly's U-2 at the Skunk Works in the 1950s.
Lawyers, politicians and accountants on Capitol Hill and in successive administrations have an inherent tendency to rate the slick, plausible proposals that companies eager to move in on each other's territory submit to them on bottom one figures only. If a company claims to be able to make an ambitious system far more cheaply than competitors who have been making similar systems for decades, it will be rated on the bottom line it projects. None of the assessors or their political masters is likely to risk embarrassment or accusations of bias by competitors with far less experience and expertise who put in lower bids.
The political echelon in both parties — after all, it was the Clinton administration, not the second Bush one, that made the disastrous decisions that led to the $4 billion FIA fiasco — has arguably less firsthand acquaintance with engineers and scientists and the issues they deal with than any previous ruling class in the United States at least since the Civil War.
None of them ever stop to ask whether a program can be carried out by a company, whether the manpower and technological resources necessary to fulfill it are avoidable, or what kind of financial and resource reserves will be available to cope with development problems and delays. None of them factors the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Murphy's Law into their cost assessments. But those eternal truths are always there, the ghosts in the machine, ready to do their worst.
Advanced technology is not magic — it cannot simply be willed to work, automatically and glitch free, always on time, without a huge amount of time, sweat, experience and learning mistakes factored into the equation. Until U.S. policymakers learn those basic lessons, they will continue to produce fiascoes like the FIA program.
