Haha, cool, I didn't know you did that! I enjoyed the back and forth between design and stress. I worked with a lot of really good people in both departments. O

Haha, cool, I didn't know you did that! I enjoyed the back and forth between design and stress. I worked with a lot of really good people in both departments. On one program we were told to target 11% MS, only reason I could figure it wasn't written down was so that when revised loads inevitably knocked the margins down a bit, we wouldn't have to constantly be changing the fudge factor in the reports to avoid showing a negative margin that was effectively positive. Humor me with a tangent: I think we should go back to design doing the stress work, for the most part, with some graybeards in stress and their anointed apprentices providing guidance and verification. AFAIK we really don't have the tech tools to do that efficiently, though, and nobody wants to invest the time. Design software needs access to all of the loads, temps, material properties from mil handbook, knockdowns, everything needs to be versioned and traceable, it needs to let you choose from a large catalog of analysis methods with good FEA as a fallback, show you the updated MS and critical load cases in realtime, always move your analysis nodes with the model as you edit it, export 3D models into the stress reports that remain live when the part/loads change so it changes in the next version of the report, etc. You mentioned git elsewhere. It would be so much better to validate stress report updates by viewing a diff. I could go on. Plenty to disrupt in this market, but the incentives aren't there for more than slow incremental change. I think only somebody who's willing to sink the money and open source the result has a chance at creating a revolution in how we design airplanes.