From my observations engineers in many disciplines would wing it all the time. Sometimes because of time/budget constraints, or simply because of lack of establ

From my observations engineers in many disciplines would wing it all the time. Sometimes because of time/budget constraints, or simply because of lack of established methodology for certain corner cases. The scope of 'corner cases' also tended to be a lot larger in their disciplines' infancy: things like bridges (and yes, aircraft) were regularly built with assumptions pulled out of one's asses.