Chapter 6
Beginning Management
My management story began in the avionics shop at Boeing flight test where I’d been employed for eight years. I had worked as an hourly Avionics Tech and advanced to a Flight Analyst flying as the technical guy on test flights. I was deep into the technical side of airplanes, and I loved it. I had been around the company long enough to get a glimpse of how big it was and the huge opportunities it offered. I had also seen Boeing in the doldrums and huge layoffs in Seattle as a teen and had vowed when I started to give it 110% so I’d never be laid off.
One day Jim Hay, my boss
asked me if I was interested in going into management. I had a ton of respect
for Jim. He had a wiry build with glasses and a full shock of white hair. An
energetic guy, always interested in technology, he had interviewed me, hired me
and had been a supporter. You’d walk by his office in the afternoon, and he’d
have some odd gadget he was showing people and would wave you in to see what it
was. I thought he was a good manager and a good leader. He had the respect of
his employees, and I liked that environment. I had also seen managers that
screamed at their employees. I thought about that job offer for a month and
figured well let’s see what this is all about.
But I also knew that you shouldn’t always promote your good technical people
into management positions because they don’t always make good managers and I
wasn’t sure about myself, if that was a side that I wanted to explore or not. I
enrolled in a three-month off hours premanagement seminar to get some further
insight. It didn’t seem too hard and another thing to try and get good at. Upon
landing the job I was sent to a further six-week school that taught about how
the corporation worked and the nuts and bolts of managing and the tools
available to Boeing managers.
I soon found myself working with seven managers covering the flight line
avionics shop of around 100 techs. It was a 24/7 operation with five, six or
more of various models in test. Since it was a three-shift operation my aim was
to stay off the night shifts as much as possible! The 3-10:00 PM shift rotation
came around about every six months and that was doable. The 12 midnight-6:00 AM
was the one that frightened me. I’d had to do a few months of it while loaned to
Renton Preflight once and got so mixed up that one time when I awakened, I
didn’t know what day it was. At first it was hard to keep my hands off things.
Then, over time, working with employees and learning how to give assignments
became easier and beginning to understand what motivates people.
I also realized that you can’t be the nice guy all the time. In fact, sometimes,
you had to give bad news or tell someone something they didn’t want to hear! I
quickly understood the huge difference between working with electronics and
machines and managing people. Electronics was on/off, true/false, yes, or no but
in working with people, there were fifty shades of grey. Different approaches
motivated different people. That first year was a fog of figuring out the new
job but soon we were deep into the 747-400 test program, and it was not going
well. Everything seemed to be late; certain parts, some of the engineering and
not much of the new test planes seemed to be working right.
This was a huge endeavor for Boeing, building the first two-crew 747 with an all-new glass cockpit, and the problems of getting the first models built and flying were enormous. I felt that somehow the engineering dept had lost the track of the configuration. I recall crouching in the electronics compartment in one 747 and talking to a couple of techs that were installing some wiring changes. As I talked to them, I realized that one guy was installing a wire and the other guy was taking it out! Now I knew for sure that the wiring configuration had been lost.
Another big lesson was a
routine status meeting that turned into a wakeup call to watch my back. I was in
a conference room in which we were running through a bunch of rejection tags
with senior management, and they were going down this big list and people from
the various orgs would answer their status. We got to a couple of ones that I
was responsible for, and my answer was “we were waiting on engineering”. All of
a sudden, this liaison engineer stood up and argued my take on the status and
made a big deal about it. Everyone turned around with raised eyebrows. I forget
who was right, but it taught me to watch my back and verify the status of things
personally. But I always remembered George Montero, the silver haired liaison
engineer who took great relish in making the avionics shop (and especially me)
look bad. I continued to run into George around flight test and in meetings and
we said hi, but I always remembered that time I got burned. The nineties
continued and soon we were deep into testing the next big program, testing and
certifying the 777-200.
The 777 was a high tech wide body with the latest in modular electronics
technology and everyone knew it was going to be a winner. By this time, I was
getting comfortable with my little part of the program and making things run as
smoothly as possible and keeping us out of trouble. The avionics techs pretty
much managed themselves and if you showed up at the plane too much you were
accused of micromanaging. Desktop PCs were becoming a permanent fixture of the
offices and I began to explore the operating systems. I bought an early IBM 8088
PC for home. The word processors made things easy, and I started doing some
writing. There was a push to improve communications around the company and I
hit on the idea of writing a monthly newsletter for the avionics shop. I didn’t
even ask anybody if I could do it, I just did it. That was the one thing I loved
about this corner of Boeing. It’s like if you just proceeded with an idea that
made sense, nobody would even say anything. I think there was an expectation for
people to innovate and come up with ideas.
I was happy because I thought this newsletter would allow me to keep myself
current on the latest avionics and to study, learn, understand and then explain
the difficult parts of the 777 fly by wire system and the other new schemes. The
two-sided newsletter would message the current test and avionics news, problems
and even allow room to write a small historical column on my favorite odd
subject: Electronic Countermeasures. Jim Hay was engaged and later approved the
purchase of some desktop publishing software. Now I had something more to do,
another purpose and was able to work on that 110%.
About the same time there was a huge push to put together teams of employees to
examine our workflows and find ways to improve things. It was called Continuous
Improvement. All managers were directed to a series of one-week schools teaching
new people skills, management strategies, how to define your processes and other
new age ‘lean’ subjects. It made sense and managers were urged (or ordered) to
form teams of employees to identify and define hindrances to their work. It was
fun to innovate in this way and it seemed like most employees felt empowered to
work with management to improve their workflows and remove barriers to their
work.
Later everyone in the company was sent to a mandatory one-week school called
World Class Competitiveness. It drew on the Toyota production system and
introduced a lean system approach to about every job in the company. I was
assigned to spend a month team-teaching classes with three other “volunteers”.
It was hard at first but the four of us were in it together with an advisor and
I went away with an increased awareness how to teach and a glimpse of how you
could take everything to a new level of efficiency. The emphasis brought most
everyone in the company to a new understanding of the serious company effort to
lean out our processes. The union said it was a ploy by the company to eliminate
jobs, but I thought most people embraced it.
It was about 1994 when everyone became aware of the internet. All the company
PCs had been loaded with a program called Netscape. It was a new thing and
allowed you to search around the company for data of all kinds and then access
to the all-new www. Everyone started to poke around this new on-line thing, and
I noted that each organization had begun to build their own webpage or presence
on the internal Boeing intranet. It looked like something new to learn and
experiment with and I went out and bought a book on html and studied the basics
of web pages and how the new coding worked.
I thought I could build a web presence for our organization of about 350 people
and another way to create things using a PC. Our group had a web focal; Bob
Malaska and I had worked with Bob on and off, and now he was a staff guy for the
third level boss. We looked at what I had and what he had. Bob was kept busy
with his staff job and so I just went with my layout and kept refining it and
learning how to make it look good and work better. I didn’t put my name on it,
it was just out there.
Microsoft Office had a decent web editor and that made it fast and easy. Nobody
said much and I had a blast fooling around with different layouts until there
was a push to make all Boeing organization’s pages have the same look and feel.
There was no real plan for adoption, so I kept building the website, making it
useful and fun. There was the ‘picture of the month’ and buttons for fast
everyday lookup links and then I had the idea to begin a ‘Troubleshooter’ page
where people could write in a question and some mysterious person (me) would do
some investigating and post the results in a big table.
I knew a software guy in engineering, Misaki and got him to build me a piece of
script that I could embed in the webpage where a textbox was displayed along
with a send button. Anyone asking a question and hitting send would privately
email me the question. I should have known this would be a recipe for trouble.
It went well right up until the end in 2004 when someone questioned the hiring
process of a new secretary and I ended up asking questions of the wrong people.
I was made to shut it down and hand the website off to another group who
probably had a big committee working the details. It was fine, I was off to
other interests, and it had been a ton of fun and the pages had been useful and
effective for ten years!
Another exciting thing was my interest in a piece of test equipment the avionics
shop owned called a SAFT Van The SAFT stood for Semi-Automatic Flightline Test.
This was a first of a kind test tool on wheels that was launched at the
beginning of the 757/767 program and was languishing in the parking lot. The
flightline normally used a large “box” on wheels, big enough for a someone to
sit inside on a chair with a test set the size of an ice chest called an ADT222.
You called a number to have it delivered to the side of the plane and when
hooked up, it supplied airspeed and altitude to the planes outside sensors for
testing. Your talked to your partner in the box over the airplane’s intercom and
told him what to dial into the test set. During the 757/767 program the SAFT Van
was developed with the basic instruments to supply airspeed and altitude and
some other signals (and eliminated the guy in the big box) and was remotely
controlled in the cockpit using an early generation touch screen on a long wire.
This was the beginning of remote-controlled flightline test instruments and it
worked. The touch screen was new and made by Fluke, and it had this square
4”x12” orange screen all in a hand carry enclosure the size of a shoebox. This
was the first touchscreen we had ever seen. One time a guy dropped a screwdriver
on the face, and it quickly filled up with random capital letters and then
started beeping and had to be replaced. The SAFT Van’s HP 9845 computer was
programmed in HPBasic, quite a feat, all written by some engineer. He probably
went nuts as it was a huge program, but it proved you could run a bunch of test
instruments by remote control.
Our organization was given a yearly allotment of what they called IMDB money. I forget what it stood for or how much we received but it allowed us to have an engineer or two from the R&D group buy equipment and work on cutting edge improvements to the van’s capabilities, and we kept at it, seeing where it would go. I worked with them, made suggestions, got them access to a plane and enjoyed being the intermediary. It became a key development platform to improve flightline testing and taking it to the next level.
We developed “pancake
adapters” and test plugs to monitor the different data busses on the plane from
the van and with those, we could monitor the pilot control inputs, the resulting
control surface movements and a ton of other information including the throttle
positions. The implications for simulation and advanced testing were far
reaching and this brought the idea of “why can’t we fly the plane on the
ground?” The R&D guys and the avionics group were electrified at the idea and
maybe this could be done.
In the van were the tools to command a bunch of test gear and now a small UNIX
computer. R&D Engineers obtained the actual flight simulator algorithms for the
777 and other Boeing planes and figured out how to run the van’s test
instruments using closed loop feedback. In other words, you could command turns
and banks using the cockpit controls and the van equipment would stimulate the
plane’s sensors and the cockpit instruments reacted just the way they would when
the plane was flying.
R&D guys assigned to the project kept tweaking and improving the code and
uploading it to the van. We wrote an engineering work authorization, so airplane
hookups and test time were sanctioned instead of asking for favors of test
operations. The thing worked well enough that the pilots and test operations
people began to take notice and to think that maybe here was another tool to
safely try out new upgraded flight control software before it was actually
flown. We knew we were onto something, but it was still too complicated of a
setup to just plug and play. But they kept at it and later was trusted enough to
become a legitimate tool in finalizing new flight control software. I think my
interest, promotion of and access to budget helped keep it moving to the next
level.
Next, in my spare time I started fooling around with writing articles on
avionics subjects and about our SAFT Van in a couple of industry trade mags. I
corresponded with editors and got a couple of things published. Surprisingly,
the articles generated enough interest that a couple of the editors from
Avionics Magazine wanted to come out and do a tour of the flight line. We did
that and it was fun getting to know them. A few weeks later they sent me a note
asking if I would give a speech at an industry convention. I knew my written
skills were better than my speaking skills and I had a boss at the time that
wanted to tone me down and he gave it to someone in customer support to do. I
was fine with it.
My world was soon to radically change. All the flight line test and support
operations were being reorganized and combined with the laboratories. This
included the wind tunnel and the fatigue labs all under a whole new management
tree. The avionics shop was combined with the flight line mechanical shop and I
was moved to work as the supervisor assigned to manage one of the planes in
test. It was a pleasant change and came with a whole new set of
responsibilities. Suddenly no more time for newsletters or SAFT Vans but I kept
running the organization’s web site.
My new job was to manage a crew of 9-12 hourly union employees with the skill
set needed to competently maintain and prepare a jet for flight. They fueled it,
recovered it, fixed whatever was found wrong and put in any changes ordered by
engineering. As the supervisor of the plane, you had to interface with many
different groups, keep things going and make good on your agreements. There was
also a daily airplane-level working group meeting to run and most importantly
placing your signature on the airworthiness “release for flight”.
It was a whole new ballgame
for me and I believed I had the tools. I’d been involved with flight line
operations for seventeen years and was familiar with all the Boeing models. And
now a new set of employees to manage who were a little more raucous and
rough-edged than the electronics guys. There was always a prank in the making
and anything that could be done to spool up the manager was fair game.
Some of the guys were wary of the new avionics guy boss and I tried to put that
to bed. I was humble, tried to admit my shortcomings and allowed that everyone
on the crew had a new ‘slate’ and we were all starting on a new path together.
That first assignment was a 767 AWACS for Japan. It was a first of a model in
test and my friend Gary Horton walked over and gave me a class on some of the
important new things I was going to need to know. That was the final walk around
procedure before signing the release for flight.
During the final steps of the airplane flight release, the airplane manager and
QA manager did separate walk arounds of the entire airplane from nose to
tail, inside and outside. This was probably the fifth walk by other people but
you could never be too sure that the plane was airworthy and ready to go. Gary
gave me some good tips on things to check for such as on the cargo doors, where
there are small windows to check that all the latches on the locks were closed
and to look at the disconnects on the brake lines and other odd places to look.
My memories now become a blur of airplanes and programs. Some easy and some
hard. Some, memorable, some not. But the real fun was to be had on the trips.
05/17/22