 Hey, welcome everybody. Well, I have 6.30 Eastern in my time. So I'm really pleased that you everyone could join us this evening I want to make sure that Everyone's aware that we're recording this afternoon. So for this evening, it's this afternoon for Paul So if you missed part of it or you want to share this with your friends will eventually have it available for you to watch later Let me introduce myself to get started. My name is Bill Crossley. I'm the J. William Muir and Anastasia born us head of aeronautics and astronauts here at Purdue University and Part of my job means I get to introduce many of our alumni and guests and Distinguished colleagues who come to speak and Paul is actually all the above our speaker tonight Let me tell you first a little about the Neil Armstrong distinguished visiting fellows And this is Paul Bevalock. Our speaker is part of that program This program started in 2019 and Paul was part of the first cadre of Neil Armstrong distinguished visiting fellows that are participating with us in the College of Engineering here at Purdue these fellows are individuals who've been recognized for their impact and Achievements and engineering or closely related fields We bring in the distinguished visiting fellows to interact with our faculty to discuss potential research projects To interact with our students to share their insights with us and the larger Purdue community And so Paul is going to do that tonight as part of his visiting fellow Title he's going to give us a talk about value and one of the things I think is really exciting here And I told Paul when he was getting ready to do this talk But it's really exciting to me to have an air analysis by training and educational background Talking about the importance of cost and value to the design of aerospace systems So to me, I think this is a neat compliment It's one of the things that we maybe don't do as well as we could in academe So Paul brings experience and thinking about that to us is going to be a great idea I Don't know if Paul remembers he probably does But I was actually fortunate enough to be Paul when I joined the ANAA Beastal Systems Technical Committee back when I was much much younger And when I was a McDonald's helicopter system So it's kind of neat to have such a small world going on here and being able to introduce Paul as an alum of the school For which I'm head to talk this evening Paul truly is Remarkable had a remarkable career to work with engineer He had his MS and PhD degrees from us here in aeronautics and astronauts Purdue while he was a commissioned Air Force officer Did a lot of research and turbulent wakes and if it's okay if I mentioned that Paul the picture above the door behind him He's actually taken from his thesis. He was just talking about that He took that research expertise over to right labs and right patterns in Air Force base We worked on turbulent jets that they were studying to provide Vertical takeoff and landing capabilities for both interceptor aircraft and search and rescue aircraft And after he finished his tour as an Air Force officer He then went to Rockwell International in Columbus where he also worked on diesel aircraft systems as Rockwell Basically closed up their business. He moved to Rocky Martin skunk works where he eventually rose to the position of chief engineer there Most people probably familiar with Paul's role in the f-35 joint strike fighter and importantly the lift fan that really made that Concept a viable concept to have the three different versions of the vehicle one of which has that vertical and short take vertical short takeoff and landing Paul's work has been recognized by many different organizations. He's a member of the National Academy of Engineering He's a fellow of the American Institute of aeronautics and astronauts. He's a recipient of the a double a aircraft design award The AHS international Paul harder award. He was voted the engineer of the year by design news He was part of the team that won the x-30 the Collier Trophy for the x-35 He's won a double is Guggenheim award, which is the highest award in aeronautics from our professional society a double a and Certainly in my mind among the most important we recognize Paul as an outstanding aerospace engineer here at Purdue in 2002 And a distinguished engineering alum in 2005 So I'm incredibly excited to have Paul give this talk about designing for value Before I turn Paul loose Let me mention a couple things real quick for those of you who are participating as we go through the talk this afternoon Feel free to post questions for Paul This is a zoom webinar and so at the bottom of your screen. There should be a little window that says Q&A If you post your question there, we'll be able to keep track of that and when Paul finishes his discussion My colleague Professor Karen Marais will help moderate the question and answers So feel free to post those as they go along you can certainly post them at the end And with that I'm going to end my housekeeping duties, and I'm so happy to have you to talk to Paul. That's my luck So I turn over to you. Thank you, Bill. Let me get my charts up on the screen here Okay, I hope you can all see that We've got it Paul. That's really good. I'm gonna go ahead and turn off my camera and mute and then I'll come back at the end to introduce Karen Okay Well, I'm gonna be talk about something new in Aircraft design designing for best value So by best value, I mean that it's affordable for the customer who gets what he wants for a price He can afford it and still profitable for the company Here on this chart. I've got a couple of airplanes that didn't satisfy the best value criteria the Concorde Now it's catching up The Concorde was very expensive and they build about 20 of them and never was successful made money for the company Airbus was probably the wrong airplane for the current market It was designed to carry 600 people from for example, Frankfurt to Miami And they couldn't find 600 people every day. So I understand it was just announced last week that it's going out of production Boeing was very courageous in designing the dreamliner Usually we wait for the military to prove a new technology and then we adapted for the commercial purposes but they went ahead and did an all-composite airplane and It was very expensive because it was such a new technology and they may never make money with that airplane You've probably read that they've been having problems with development So let me talk about how performance has a cost There are three airplanes spiders The F-16 is Mach 2 and cost 28 million The F-15 is Mach 2 5 costs 52 million and the SR 71 is Mach 3 and costs 135 million but the hidden cost is that At 28 million they sold 4,600 F-16s for a total program value of 129 billion dollars The F-15 they only sold 1,200 and a total program value of 62 billion and the SR sold 32 of them for program value of 4 billion So performance has a cost direct cost in the airplane but also a hidden cost and it said hidden cost that I'm going to try to address today Really that reflects what we saw in the previous chart reflects the Pareto rule Pareto was an Italian civil engineer about a hundred years ago and as a civil engineer he had his own business and he analyzed his business and found that 20% of his customers were providing 80% of his profits and he had a pea garden out back He observed that 20% of the plants were producing 80% of the peas and then he looked at land ownership in Europe at that time he found 20% of the people owned 80% of the land and so he published what he called the Pareto rule based on those observations and other things that were current at that time This is a more recent version of that rule from Norm Augustine's book It covers a wide variety of things optical lens focal lengths salary of ball players is function of their batting average the speed of airplanes there's the F-16, F-15, F-14 and SR-71 the cost of diamonds, the accuracy of machine parts, etc and they all follow that rule that you get 80% of the performance for 20% of the cost and the last 20% of performance runs you 80% of the cost it's probably a reflection of the law of diminishing returns you can increase the cost without limit but the value of increased performance diminishes for example if you're in a dark room you light one candle it makes a difference if you have a thousand candles lit and you light a thousand first it doesn't really make a difference so that's the Pareto rule and we have these equations that we use to calculate the cost of an airplane each company has their own proprietary system the government has its proprietary system so a lot of room for negotiation when we're negotiating a contract but this is the RAND equations from about 1985 and you can see that the major driving parameter is the weight and then the speed and the number of aircraft and other things like Gs and range and payload are higher order terms so I just focus on these first three first order terms so costs fall into two categories non-recurring costs of development engineering hours testing and flight tests and then the recurring costs are the costs of building each airplane engineering hours for sustaining work actual manufacturing labor manufacturing tooling and manufacturing materials but these equations don't include that hidden cost of performance and it's hard to get data for commercial airplanes here's one I can tell you about because I work for Lockheed they came up with the concept of the tri-jet and it was a Cadillac and in fact there's an example visible here in these pictures the third engine was mounted on the center line of the airplane so that it didn't induce a pitching moment but it required the development of a very sophisticated S-duct to take air from above the fuselage down to the inlet of the engine and they changed the cross-sectional shape of the duct to control the passage the developed and assure that they got uniform flow at the engine face but it was very expensive so American Airlines did something I think was probably unethical they went with the drawings to Douglas aircraft and said can you build us a Chevy version of this airplane and you can see what they did they eliminated the S-duct and just mounted the engine on the tail it was simpler but now you had a nose down pitching moment and you had to trim that out unfortunately marketing it said there was a market for a hundred of these airplanes and both Lockheed and Douglas sold 50 a piece both when bankrupt Douglas was purchased by McDonald Lockheed had a loan that the government guaranteed and was able to stay in business but there's the penalty hidden cost of performance I mentioned that we don't really know about the commercial prices because they sell them like cars there's an MSRP manufacturer suggested retail price but nobody pays that and we don't know what they actually cost but the military aircraft are a matter of record they're in the congressional digest which you can look up and see what it cost over the years so here's just a number of airplanes that went through some rough times and you can see here as the costs went up the numbers of the aircraft went down and in fact the US-101 was a classic example of what happened to a program the government initially asked for a commercial off-the-shelf helicopter so Lockheed teamed with Gusto Westlin and took one of the British helicopters and offered it for the presidential helicopter and won the contract and after they received the contract government came back and said well instead of just flying to Camp David could you fly to the hidden secret hidden mountain hideout and Lockheed said yeah but it'll take a bigger rotor and more power and a more powerful gearbox and they said there's a check so they started to do it and the government said well wait a minute he's going to be on there now not for ten minutes but for hours can you put a head in there and Lockheed said yeah but it'll cost and they said well here's the check you can do it what if he gets hungry well can you put a chef in a kitchen on it and oh my god what if the mushroom clouds go up while he's on board we need all his communication gear can you put that on it and it drove the price of the single helicopter up to six hundred million dollars which was more than any aircraft it ever cost and when President Obama got elected saw what that was going on he cancelled the program so there you are as a performance increased the price increased until it became unaffordable and that happened in the case of these other airplanes as well for different reasons but it's a trend some of the guys in marketing when I showed them that chart said well yeah they get fewer airplanes but we still got all their money and I said no you don't so I made this chart this shows the total program value as the numbers cost of the aircraft increased and the numbers went down you can see that the total program value decreased also so you didn't get all their money so let's look at how that money is distributed here's the production of the 767 it's a little ragged but typically start out at a low production rate you build up to some peak and then you eventually fall off because your competitors come up with a competing airplane cost of fuel goes up government requirements go up cost of materials go up and eventually the airplane has to be retired so you have this general bell shaped curve for commercial airplane you have to invest money at the front and then sell enough airplanes to break even and then you can make a profit that investment is the rdt and e-cost research development test and evaluation in the government contracting we have a different situation we don't have a showroom where we design an airplane put it on the showroom floor the generals come in and kick the tires and say I'll take a hundred we win a contract to develop and design and develop the airplane so we make a profit on that and then we make profit on the numbers of airplanes we sell but as we've seen as the development costs go up you don't make more money on the airplane you actually make less money because the numbers come down because the cost has gone up so how do we predict that at the suitable level for conceptual design when you're trying to do trades what we used to do is just design a nominal airplane and see what the cost per pound was and then if somebody came up with a new gimmick like an electro hydraulic actuator system or a helmet with the HUD projected onto the visor of the helmet you would say well what's the cost per pound and if it was greater than that nominal cost you'd say it doesn't buy its way onto the airplane if it's less it does but that's not enough adequate so let's look at the cost of airplanes here's numbers of fighter and attack aircraft over the last 50 or so years as a function the unit cost is in the number of aircraft as a function of their cost you see as the cost goes up the numbers come down and there's an equation that fits through there 27037 times cost to the point minus 0.935 within our square to 0.65 and that fits onto this curve also from Augustine's book this is the cost of stuff that the government buys for the military because it's a matter of record from bazookas at the top left down to aircraft carriers at the bottom right and you can see that the airplanes tend to fall above or on that line and that has a similar slope 0.930 instead of 935 and you put them all together on the same chart and adjust Augustine's 1980 data for 2015 so they're all consistent you see that the trend line for military aircraft all the military purchases and those new programs pretty much follow the same slope so I think we can say for no good reason except statistics that you can approximate the fewer numbers of aircraft you're going to sell as the cost increases by that slope in yellow line so here's a spreadsheet I worked up to illustrate how that might work for a generic kind of program this is a 10 year program with two years of development research development engineering and eight years of production and frankly I picked 10 years because that was the largest number of years I could put on a chart and still have numbers that were legible it looks complicated but it really isn't it's just addition and division so let me go through it here the next step is the engineering I assume an airplane weighed 25,000 pounds with the maximum speed of around Mach 15 two prototypes and a thousand airplanes so the rand equations which are generic and publicly available predict that it would cost almost a billion dollars for the engineering development in each of two years and then you go to production where the engineering is staining engineering during production totals another couple of billion dollars then here's the production ramp it starts at 50 goes to 100 then 150 then plateaus at 200 and comes down 150 150 symmetrically now you have to distribute the cost over those 10 years and I use something that is called the learning curve which was developed by Ted Wright in the 1930s and has worked since then we still use it today airplanes generally come in at about 85% learning curve which is the green line there so when you hear that the new airplane is costing 100 million dollars well that's the first airplane but it comes down pretty quickly and asymptotes half or less of that price with 85% learning curve so I took the grand equations got the total program cost and iterated on the initial cost until the learning curve 85% learning curve in this case gave me the total that I was looking for and so that gave me the total program costs some of the engineering costs plus the manufacturing costs then here's the profits you add up the well you negotiate a fee in this case I assume 15% and you add that to the cost and that's your selling price the gross margin is the difference between what it costs you and what you can sell it for and there's a joke about that the dumbest guy in class comes back to his high school 10 year reunion as a low chauffeur limousine in the silk suit with a diamond for his class ring and everybody's amazed that Jake one of the guys goes over and asks him how'd you make all that money Jake said well you know when I graduated from high school I didn't know what I was going to do so I watched a lot of sports on TV and drank beer and I would fall asleep and the beer would go flat when I woke up so I cut me this sheet of paper and I cut this thing out of it to put in the top of the beer can to keep it from going flat and my buddies came over they thought that was cool and asked if I'd make one for them and their buddies wanted some so I made a machine that would punch them out for me and then I went to Amazon and Boyd sales took off so I got a factory now with 25 machines and 25 people making it and that that cost me 50 cents to make them and I sell them for $5 and that 10% profit is how I make my money so he's still the dumbest guy in class but he's smart like a fox and his gross margin is $4.50 and that represents the amount of money that you can use as a slush fund if you run into problems because you generally have a fixed price contract and then you have a profit on top of that and the profit is determined by the selling price divided by the cost so even though you have a 15% fee your profits are 13% so a picture is worth a thousand words and here's what that looks like the engineering first two years of engineering are around a billion a piece with overhead engineering in red, the overhead in orange and then the profits in green before taxes and then you go into manufacturing and you can see that the number of engineers never reached the number required to develop the airplane so the company needs to have several programs in the hopper working on either the engineers go back and they work on R&D technology development for the next program or they write proposals or they do other work in the company so that's the distribution of those numbers and what we've seen is that when the costs go up come down so we want to quantify that using that slope of that curve for the cost of airplanes the next question is how do you handle revision and additional work on an airplane so if you want to add some feature to the airplane like say a pylon to a wing there are engineering hours for designing a new component and basically I'm suggesting you can just use the weight of that component because the total program costs is some of the weights of all the components of the airplane the whole airplane for redesigning an existing component here is the first five aircraft built and you can see that the costs increase initially at a slower and slower rate until they finally level off asymptote but the difference between the first airplane and the second airplane usually reflects lessons learned from the first airplane and changes you have to make the equation for the second airplane and subtract the costs from the first airplane you get the cost of redesign and if you use a weight of a component in that equation that gives you some way of estimating the cost of a redesign so let's say we want to add $100 million to the cost of the program in engineering development because of something we're going to add that corresponds to a component that weighs 650 pounds and you can see there at the bottom that the price of the each airplane has gone from just under $27 million to just over $27 million it adds about $100,000 to the cost of each airplane so here's the lesson on that $100 million at a 15% fee you earn $14.9 million of added profit during development but you build four fewer airplanes based on the slope of the line $0.94 you have four fewer aircraft and you lose their profits so you lose $16 million in fact then it cost you a million bucks in lost profits to do that additional engineering work and that's what we saw in those trend lines for the four programs in the initial charts the additional work required in the case of the helicopter to add range, kitchen, bathroom communications gear made it look good initially because you earned profit on that but the program ended up being canceled in the end because the cost went so high and that's a difficult problem for the program manager in the initial days because the customer comes to you he asks for money how are you going to tell your management that you've turned it down because it's going to cost money in the long run an even more serious problem is delaying the engineering or taking additional time to do additional engineering so another year I've added in this case and that adds another I just assumed it was the same level of effort for the third year and I assumed that the airplane sales ramped up at the same rate as before but they came down at the same rate as initially because the airplane initially would have gone out of production because competitors developed airplanes requirements changed cost of fuel went up but those are all outside the program they have no influence so whatever would happen was going to happen in the new program too and you can't expect it's just going to add another couple of years to the program and make up the lost money so what's sometimes done is add concurrency so let me show you a look at the red area you start building the airplane before you've completed the development of it with the attention to coming back and fixing whatever you added to the later airplane technology, higher technology fix or whatever and Boeing is doing that for example on their 7 what is it? the 787 the dreamliner and we did that on the F117 for example the first F117s that came out the stealth coatings were on there like contact paper they were a thick sheet of stuff with glue and they were stuck onto the airplane and we built a robotic spray machine to put it on in layers robotically and then when the machine was working the rest of the airplanes were built with that new machine we brought the old first airplanes back took off this contact paper and sprayed the new coatings on them so they all came up to the same standard and that turned out to work but if initially $44 million of additional profit in the extra years of work you actually reduce your profit by over a billion dollars so you make $150 million on research and development and you lose a billion in production so the government isn't stupid I mean they've learned the lesson the C5 was required to have kneeling landing gear so that the guys could jump out of a fox hole run up to the airplane and pick up a crate of ammo and run back into their fox hole and that drove the cost of the airplane to have a landing gear that could land an airplane that huge and still lower when it was on the ground and they finally realized that they were never going to use it because they would never take an airplane that big and expensive up to a fox hole it would always operate from an airfield somewhere far back another example it was going to have supersonic terrain following and that drove the cost of the airplane going supersonic on the deck and then taking the Gs of following the terrain and it turned out the pilots couldn't take it it was worse than a roller coaster and so they never used it when I asked Lee Nicolai he was in the Air Force for 20 years and retired as a colonel but then joined Lockheed in the Skunk Works which was a very advanced design conceptual design why did you guys give that requirement and they said if you told us what it would have cost we wouldn't have asked for it so that's what they do now this is the old model the government would issue requirements in this case say 1-5 Mach number and 7.5 Gs and we designed the lightest airplane that would meet those requirements with some little margin now they're saying we don't know what costs we don't know what we need you tell us we'll tell you what we can afford we can afford a 24,000 pound airplane and you tell us where on that design line there's the right place to be if we like it we'll buy it and if we don't we won't I also promise that you could use this method to tackle with the cost to win let's say you designed a nominal airplane and turns out that you've got too much money into it so you plot the slope of those parameters in this case speed Gs and signature and you see that you get the most gain by reducing the amount to be cut by cutting the speed of the airplane whereas if you come in under cost and you want to put a little money into some new technology it's stealth that you want to add to the best payoff so it's different depending on whether your initial design was above or below your target price okay so we've been talking about costs but things have a value so if you have zero speed on an airplane you'd have zero cost to the speed but an impractical airplane so initially speed has a value and at some point it crosses over so we want to know how do you assess the value of something unfortunately it's not a simple equation because every airplane has a different mission but there are techniques you can use for example if you want to know the value going from 7.5 Gs to 8 Gs you can use pilot in the loop air combat simulator or there's now software with artificial intelligence that will run thousands of air combats and tell you what the value of increasing the Gs is for example in the exchange ratio or in the case of a transport aircraft you might have a goal of transporting a marine brigade overnight in one standard period of darkness as they call it and you would find that if you go faster you only need fewer airplanes you need fewer airplanes whereas if you go slower you need more airplanes and so you can trade the speed versus the cost of the numbers of airplanes you would have to buy to perform that mission and that's the way you have to assess the value so in the traditional 20th century way of designing airplanes we were fighting drag and gravity with lift and thrust and our engineers were pretty good at getting a good lift to drag ratio on efficient engines producing enough thrust but in the 21st century to maintain the lead we have I mean airplanes are the only thing abroad that brings in positive exchange everything else we buy now so innovation has to drive convention we have to do things differently and affordability has to fight gold plating that comes with adding features that are too expensive to the airplane so the lesson here is that accelerating development because stretching out the development is very expensive makes it more affordable and provides the best value to our customers and the greatest return to the manufacturer F117 which is an example of how you do that the thing you needed to do was show you could build a stealthy airplane so there's no need to develop a new landing gear that came from the F-15 the engines came from the F-18 the displays from the F-18 the fly-by-wire flight controls from the F-16 and that's the way to maintain the technological edge and do it affordably so that concludes my presentation I think I stayed within the 40 minute limit and I'm going to be able to take some questions great thank you very much cool so we're open to questions now and the way we are going to do the questions is there is a Q&A panel that you can see at the bottom of your screen and so if you'd like to type in your question there into the Q&A panel then I will be working through that to ask the questions to you two folks and Bill in the audio will also be helping me to make sure that we we work through the questions there so please do go ahead and put your questions in there I think lots of interesting food for someone that you gave us both so thank you for that I guess our first question is kind of an easy one that's not related to your presentation at all and I guess someone is interested in history so they would want to know who was the first dean or I guess President Perdue to invite you back to come and share your experience and advice with us here actually Tom she was the department head at the time and he invited me back to come back for three years of service to the Perdue giving back to the community great and I know Tom is here as well so nice little connection there and then maybe I'll start with a question from my side you talked a lot about kind of ecosystems and so forth what are your thoughts on software because I think that sometimes nowadays we think of our computers of our airplanes as computers with wings so what are your thoughts on the cost of software and the value of software well that's a good question a very good question because in 1985 the F-16 had maybe 200,000 lines of code and the Dreamliner and the F-22 and the F-35 have like 5 million lines of code and it can really delay the program software not being ready so what we've been forced to use is something that developed by TRW code the constructive cost model where they divide development into three levels complex new program nobody understands there's a lot of people to develop the other end of the spectrum well understood fewer people to develop and then something intermediate and those curves look like this for lines of code so you can see out at 5 million with the complex code system how much the cost have increased and those are engineering hours 150 to 200 dollars an hour is what the government gets when we get the overhead and so it's enormous now and it can drive the cost of a program and delay it significantly it's somewhere I think Purdue could make a contribution to improve this comaco method to try to get something more less judgmental I guess you'd say this is just opinion to have some data to do it like the random equations are based on what, that's the question great, thank you okay I see the questions are pouring in so let me go to the next one so when you're thinking about new or developing technology where maybe you don't have convention to rely on what specific risks to designers keep in mind some of them will be specific to the technology but what might be the risks that come associated with just doing new technology and I think the question went on there to ask about also programs like agility prime before I let you answer I'd just like to remind people to please try to use the Q&A and window see some questions coming up in the chat it will help us to moderate if you can put your questions in the Q&A window go ahead Paul so the question is how do you predict something sorry let me maybe repeat that so the question is asking about when we're doing new kinds of technologies what kinds of risks should you consider and I think maybe not asking you about specific risks to that technology but just the risk associated with trying to incorporate new technologies in a system well my rule is one miracle per program so like you see on the F117 here the miracle was stealth everything else off the shelf you would like to make the airplane better by designing a new landing gear and designing custom engines etc and you don't do that if you're trying to control costs but if you are trying to assess risk we have what's called a risk waterfall you try to prioritize the risks and make some judgment call from the experts on what it's going to take and there's actually a formula that people use you ask people how long do you think it's going to take to develop this new technology if you do it as quickly as you could possibly could nothing went wrong how long would that take if it took everything went wrong how long would that take and then what do you think it'll probably take and then you take a weighted average one times the shortest four times the longest and one times the maximum worst case divide by six and you put that into your schedule the problem is you would think then that on average with a lot of technologies you would come out somewhere close to your guess but what happens is an engineer can always make it better so anybody who finishes soon says well if I tell them I'm done I'm going to have to find a new charge number and I told them it would take longer and I can make it better so I'm going to keep working on it and what you end up with is everything that would have underrun and then you're left with all the overruns so the secret and the skunk works is to be understaffed undermaned in short schedule so there's no time to optimize in the skunk works if we get a contract they take 10% from the top and that's the number you work to and if you're on schedule and on budget they take another 10% from you so you're always pulling your hair out trying to finish on time but that's the secret you don't let people optimize because you can spend money making it better and you are making it better but you can't afford it great thank you so I'm going to stand a couple of kind of system equations and then there are some more kind of questions related to specific systems so another question is asking about what is the main factor that affects the cost of aircraft so coming from propulsion systems, materials, guidance, operation, where is it coming from well it comes from the equation according to the RAND equation the biggest thing is the size of the airplane the weight of the airplane next biggest thing I wouldn't have thought but it is the speed the cues that the airplane has to be designed for and after that it's economies of scale it's the numbers of aircraft and then things like range, payload, G's are higher order and not that significant so the biggest thing is the speed is the weight of the airplane the next biggest thing is speed and the economies of scale the numbers that you're going to build because you're amortizing the development costs over more airplanes okay so it sounds like you're saying it's more about what we're asking the airplane to do than the specific technologies that we're using right but do you remember the RAND equation we developed when we were doing all aluminum airplanes and now we end up spending more money to get composites into the airplane to get the weight down but weight isn't really the parameter anymore it's cost and so we really need to be focusing on costs not traditional things like weight here's a fun one have you ever seen any really great designing ideas go to weight because of their cost and if so what were they if you can share some really great airplanes that some really great design ideas go to weight because of their cost oh well the first chart I think had some the Concorde the A380 and maybe the Dreamliner okay the Dreamliner is a beautiful aircraft yeah it's an amazing aircraft but they spent so much developing it that they may never make money on it speaking of the Concorde what do you do you see the new boom supersonic airline or the XB-1 having a profitable future is it going to ask you to domesticate a bit well I'm going to say that as a business jet it might work but the fact that it can't fly over land means we have to work on boom and NASA is working that Boeing and Lockheed are working that problem we can get the boom down so it can fly over land it could be a practical solution but you know the strength of the shock is proportional to the weight of the airplane and so smaller business jets might be the place to go or regional jets sizes of airplanes you know 50 to 100 passengers rather than 500 or so forth the interesting thing is the Concorde if you have offloaded enough fuel enough passengers to put enough fuel to give it a range from say London to LA it's not a business jet you can carry four or five passengers so it's a challenge it's a neat challenge for us to be working on okay here's an interesting philosophical question if we impose pressures to people to stay on time does that create problems for quality or can it put people in ethical boundaries and if so how do we address that well it's a classical problem the engineer wants to do a good job he wants to take the time necessary and the manager wants to submit a low cost bid so there's a lot of negotiation going on and you have to be as a chief engineer or program manager you have to be sort of familiar enough with all the technologies that you know when somebody's being optimistic or pessimistic about their estimates the best you can do is like we say keep the people busy let them know there's plenty of work to be done they don't have to make it perfect the enemy are good enough another thing I think that we've been talking a lot in the college that gets a lot of popular attention at least in the sort of technology literature is machine learning and AI and how do you think these kinds of things like AI and machine learning applied to aircraft design how might that could that reduce the cost of aircraft development? Oh it has it has already we're using robots to build airplanes artificial intelligence to figure out the best way to put them together in fact in the joint strike fighter we switched from 2D blueprints to 3D and I thought that was neat and I said why don't we put the computers down on the shop floor so the mechanics instead of printing 2D drawings on these 3D designs why don't we give them the 3D designs and the government said don't do that what you want to do is tell them how to put it together so we worked it out the sequence of parts that you assembled the airplane in and put that on the floor and that's what they use so we're using artificial intelligence already and it'll continue to bring down the cost just like it has with automobiles now the problem is you have 100,000 cars and you're building 100, 200, 300 airplanes so you can't make the investment without driving the cost side to trade off between craft and automation another question about thinking about cut so your presentation was really from the perspective of the manufacturer and the cost to the developer manufacturer how would this kind of analysis look from the point of view of the owner well the owner just sees a price that he's charged for the airplane go ahead well I say if he can afford it he buys it I mean I would like a Ferrari I can't afford it so I settle for something else you know he sees the bottom line which is what they want to charge for the airplane it's the same thing they sell lots of Corvettes and even more Camaro's than they do Ferraris fair enough okay your customer comes to you with a requirement that it's unsafe or unfeasible or there's some better way to do something if they're asking you to do it in a specific way how do you go about explaining that to your customers how do you educate your customer, your client well that's the purpose really of course we have a lot of engineers at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and in Nav Air they are attending meetings listening to people knowing what's real and what's B.S. and they are more receptive than they've ever been in the past it used to be they'd give us the requirements and that was it we had to design to the requirement now as Colonel Nicolai said we must have supersonic V-STOL, stealthy, survivable important to have and nice to have and we classified them with the government and they agreed this is nice to have but we don't really need it I have a follow up on the AI question and so can you comment on how willing the aviation sector might be to incorporate these black box machine learning techniques in a way we don't actually know what the code is doing so what would be the aviation sector's willingness to use this kind of code we can't go into the reasoning we did that with materials before we really understood them I mean you test and test and test and it's test okay black box you accept it you have to because no one person can check five million lines of code so you break it up into segments and you test them and if they work you see you accept what's in there so I think the AI design code that passes all the tests would be accepted I think another topic that comes up quite a bit is sort of maintaining our technological age here in the United States and corporations and their IP and so forth as we go more and more digital and I think also the headlines about people being hacked and so forth what might be your suggestions for the United States and companies here to maintain their technological advances and kind of not lose out well that's my suggestion innovation instead of convention you've got to find new ways of doing things and you've got to realize when your goal plating and you're putting something on the airplane that really doesn't belong there it costs too much thinking a little bit about the regulators and also because I've seen my time thinking about safety a lot so as I do these trade studies how do FAA requirements and certification requirements and safety requirements how does that play into this whole picture of cost as an independent variable I'm sorry give me that question again so how do safety requirements and then your certification requirements how do they play into this kind of view of the world with cost as an independent variable well the problem with the the 8 the Boeing max they have just added a guy to the board who is responsible for safety and the FAA is going to get more involved and not just rely on the engineers in the company you know they offloaded a lot of this certification to the company to be okay so they accepted it and they're getting more involved so you need an outside impartial maybe painting the body person saying are you sure about this I mean to rely on one sensor for the control you know these pitch down control on the max was a big mistake somebody should have said you can't rely on one sensor everything has to be at least double and sometimes quad redundant I think I read an article the interview a lot of the old Boeing engineers and the new Boeing is different than the old Boeing they're more focused on profits and the old Boeing was focused on engineering and safety and they said this never would have happened in the old Boeing because we were pride took pride in building airplanes that wouldn't kill people we would stop the line so to speak if we found the safety problem yeah but I think as you mentioned on your graphs ultimately a company needs to make a profit so it's finding that kind of balance in doing the safety things you need to do and taking the time to do things properly but at some point things also have to go out of the door well the FAA needs more money from the congress it's the other solution you mentioned that the RAND equations and I think you also talked about COCOMO a bit what would you recommend for people to do right now and other than of course we need to do more research I'd love for you to get involved in that but what would be the best kind of ways to think about cost estimation now I think the RAND equations might be really done without weight as one of the parameters talking about materials or manufacturing techniques and software has become such a big part of the design process that we need something equivalent to the RAND equations for software development I think we're sort of getting towards the end of the time so if I can ask you sort of a question I think that is I've just been told I can have one or two more questions so great here's a nice one so we have two major companies currently really in the world making the large body aircraft do you see that continue with the two major aircraft companies or is there room for more players or what do you think is going to happen there well I hope there's room for more players because competition keeps you sharp in thinking Chinese are going to perhaps be entering the business and initially I'm not too worried about them I'll tell you some stories about Chinese designers but yeah I think there's room for some more people there's booming air traffic Chinese don't really fly the way we do there's a huge market there the airplanes are built and available okay and then let me end with a question which is kind of near and dear to our heart here with educators what do you see as the future of aerospace specifically kind of in terms of what should we be teaching our students like if you know if you could think about a couple of things that we should really be adding an aerospace education what might those be software engineering and some costing I think we were using weight for so many that's all we talked about was the weight of the airplane we need to add some economics and engineering economics it's not Marx versus capitalism you know let me just do a time check here real quick and see if we can I think we're at the end of our time I would like to thank everyone I saw so many great questions come by here on the Q&A box I wasn't able to convey all of them but thank you everyone for a great question and call for giving you some very interesting insights and I think with that I'll turn it over to Bill. Great thanks Karina thanks Paul once again I really appreciate you Paul spending some time with us this evening and I know since we've gotten used to the virtual work having you here via Zoom it's been great to have you we had a bunch more questions Paul I don't know if you'd be interested in us sending those along to you if you're curious about that or not we just couldn't get to everybody's this evening. No sure I'd be glad to try to answer them That'd be great I'll go ahead and send those along we can figure out how to make those available because we can touch them somewhere along with the recording of this Maybe we'll group them for me so I don't have to answer the same question 12 times Yeah that's one of the challenges we left with Karina this evening she had to sort through and and she was trying to sort through which one follows this one and trying to make a nice job so again thank you too Karina You did a great job Great so with that I guess I'll wrap this up for this evening again thanks everyone for attending Paul thank you so much for participating and being part of our New Armstrong Distinguished Visiting Fellows Program here with Theronautics and Astronauts I certainly appreciate it Well I enjoy it, thank you Great we'll have to get you back to campus pretty soon when we can get you to travel again Alright with that sounds good everyone have a good night everyone thank you again for joining us Take care and be safe Bye