This article first appeared in the December 2017 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here So we flew back from Canada to Cayman after Christmas. I travel a lot; to and from the US, Canada, Europe and the Caribbean. Airports suffer from greater and lesser degrees of design and operational competence in their layout […]

Since the relaunch of our website last year, we have clocked half a million downloads from the technical library. We are especially happy because from the time we relaunched the website we had to ‘start from scratch’ and establish all of our search engine rankings and external links. We now have typical mid-week downloads of […]

This article first appeared in the September 2017 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here In the last months, I have spoken to 3 programs concerning investment and investor relations for the prototype phase of their aircraft program. We have been involved with prototype development for startup companies since we formed Abbott Aerospace in […]

As some of you may know by now, one of my focus areas is program cost – especially on composite aircraft programs. We see many programs and while many aspects and details are project specific, there are some universal rules. This is one – this is my wording but I am sure that the sentiment […]

This post originally appeared in the Abbott Aerospace March 2017 Newsletter. Click here to Subscribe I rarely engage in public debate on social media platforms. There is usually little point as it is not a good forum to make people change their mind. It usually ends up as a name calling exercise and you end […]

As the owner of a small engineering service company, one of our major costs is software. This represents an investment cost and of course the ongoing cost of that most honorable of all con games – software maintenance fees. This was thrown into sharp relief in the last couple of years as we relocated to […]

You can read the original post here. There is customer service and then there is Microsoft customer service. Following on from the inability of Microsoft to transfer an Office 365 account between countries I received an email notice from Microsoft regarding the old and now delinquent account. This is the account that we had let slide into […]

It seems that once a month I end up writing some rant about a piece of software. Believe me, this is not my intention but once a month something essentially stupid happens with a piece of technology. This month it is microsoft’s turn. I joke about other companies turning into Microsoft as, in some aspects, […]

Excel as a Reporting Tool – Part 4, The First 3 Rules Excel as a Reporting Tool – Introduction – Part 1 here Excel as a Reporting Tool – The Basics – Part 2 here Excel as a Reporting Tool – Printing, Columns and Rules – Part 3 here In the previous post we outlined the […]

Excel as a Reporting Tool – Part 3, Printing, Columns and Rules Excel as a Reporting Tool – Introduction – Part 1 here Excel as a Reporting Tool – The Basics – Part 2 here Excel does not cope well with different printers and adapting page breaks and scaling from one printer to another. An […]

Excel as a Reporting Tool – Part 2 – The Basics – Part 1 here Choosing your Font Font selection is important. It is important to select a font that looks clear on the screen and when printed out. It is preferable to select a font that is part of the windows native font package […]

First Post – Introduction In writing our free textbook I had to make what I consider to be a huge personal and professional concession. I had to use Microsoft Word. I started out writing the book in Excel but the page formatting and section numbering and referencing issues were too great. Word is great writing […]

Our website was down for half a day yesterday due to our hosting service suffering through a targetted Denial of Service cyberattack. It looks like everything is back up and running normally now. Thanks for your patience.

We are a family owned business – most small businesses are. We work for larger corporations. Some of our clients are also small businesses and are family owned as well. Simple stuff. Well, it is simple until one of your clients start to owe you money. Like all businesses we are understanding of clients having […]

In our office, we have been discussing how to implement effective design cost control and/or monitoring. We have had the good fortune to have worked on many different levels of projects from multi-billion dollar high-performance  jet program to much more humble part 23 prototypes. We have learned the importance of asking the following questions: Why use […]

It is risky as a business owner to make a comment that could be interpreted as political. Especially in North America where anything and everything is interpreted as political. This comment is apolitical. If you choose to interpret it as a political comment I can’t stop you. We have been using Google since we started our […]

An old colleague of mine (Dave Robinson) recently posted an article on linked in. It was a video of an AIAA discussion panel on why aircraft take more than 4 years to bring to market. I have to admit that I did not watch the whole video. It was over 2 hours long and I have […]

Remarkable (but very frightening) video that shows tail-plane flutter.        

NASA and the Smithsonian Museum have made available a high resolution 3D scan of the Apollo 11 Command module which is made up of over a trillion points. You can view it here. Screenshot of the version available on the web is shown above.  Downloadable models are available on the main page here. 47 years ago we landed on […]

A note on Google. We love Google – we use Google as the backbone for our company communications and Google hangouts makes a lot of what we do possible. But since we moved from Canada to the Cayman Islands we have had trouble getting our Google maps entry to update correctly. First we were not able […]