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