[LRflex] Re: IMG: Another couple of Church shots

David Young wrote:

Good Mornin' Charlie!

You said:


Glad I didn't know more about Lee when he was in power, I'd have
been worried sick. :-)
I'm not so sure about that... I had the opportunity to speak with the man on several occasions. And, despite some personal disagreements with him, I still feel he was the right man for the times. He shepherded a moribund firm into the digital era. He took a firm on the verge of bankruptcy and made it profitable. He was also a staunch advocate of the "R" series. 
Stock Photography at: http://tinyurl.com/2amll4


David,
  Interesting times indeed.  It's that sort of short term thinking
that gives me the willies.  I worked for Pratt & Whitney for 25 years,
I work for another division of United Technologies now.  I hired in
in 1979.  At that point we had an overall market share of 85%, and we
were working on an engine to replace the hugely successful JT-8D,
which was to be called the JT-10D.  Harry Gray wanted to make us into
another diversified (read less cyclic) giant like GE, and cancelled the
JT-10D, figuring not to compete with ourselves.  This created a niche
for GE to team with SNECMA to make the CFM-56, which is now so succesful
they make them on a moving production line, like cars, and Pratt's civil
market share is around 3% in OEM, and around 12% in service.  (UTC as a
whole is doing rather better, of course.
  Decisions you make for the short term can come back to haunt you. :-)
Thanks for the insight about the inner workings in Solms.
  Do you think speaking out of turn about a
full frame M-8 may have been the terrible thing?

--
Charlie Falke                                         _____      /\
                                                | __/\__/------/__)
                                                |(____\/_________/
"One test result is worth                        |    |/        `o
 one thousand expert opinions" - Wernher Von Braun   0  N4003M
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein

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