Quality Assurance

[Bryan Cotton]

When I used to work at Sikorsky, Q/A was an important part of the job. Inspectors independently go over the work of others to ensure it is up to standard. The first step in quality, however, is to be critical of your own work. Quality is built in, not inspected in. The other day my 12 year old was unhappy with one of his rivets on the left stabilizer. He showed me the head was not quite flush against the aft spar. The issue is that it is tight on the edge of the spar channel. Independently he thought to check his other rivets, both on the left stab and the right stab we did last week. He found a few other bad rivets and circled them with a red sharpie for rework. He gets it! A better learning moment than if I had found it. Something we can both be proud of.

[vigilant104]

Bryan,
Looks like you are bringing that son up right. Keep it up--he can crawl back into that tailcone to do inspections a lot farther than you can, and his little arm will be able to reach bits inaccessible to you or me!
Be warned: All these cute pictures are gonna come back to haunt you during his rebellious teen tears. To his friends: "Here's another picture of my dad making me work on his airplane. No dinner until I'd set 100 rivets. One time he made me fix a whole bunch of them because they 'weren't good enough'!"
More seriously--thanks for the post. It looks like you guys are having a great time, and I wish my dad and I had worked on such a project together.