2023-02-14 Flight Test Culture Discussion

Owned by Dhruv Upadhyay
Last updated: 2024-05-14 by R D
2 min read

Scope

  • How to foster a team culture where we are stringent on flight testing requirements and execute on it

  • Ensuring an overall flight test culture that prevents failures as we saw in the past two flight tests

Problems

  • Hesitance to cancel flight tests

    • has effectively been not an option, heavily disincentivized

    • Make it clear that if a certain threshold isn’t met, then its grounds to cancel things

  • Risk tolerance is not codified/communicated

    • Making sure the leadership is aligned on our risk tolerance level

      • Risk tolerance per project and per flight doesn't necessarily need to be written, but should be communicated to stakeholders

    • Improves our ability to properly communicate concerns

      • Causes people to assume what should be issued as a concern or not

    • People didn’t properly communicate issues, because they thought that risk tolerance was higher

      • Should be fostering a culture where people speak up

  • Poor scheduling and deadlines

    • we can’t have action items falling on a particular individual

    • frame by one person, harnessing by one person on Feb 11th

  • Lack of delegation was a problem

    • Harnessing done because it wasn’t delegated to anybody else, needed to be done in an unhealthy and unideal fashion

    • Need to delegate people responsible for the taskings, who can then further delegate tasks out to more members

  • Take mindset of the team into account

    • (e.g. super stressed people don’t make for good quality work)

  • Fewer opportunities for flight tests makes it harder for people to call off the meeting

    • Bound to WRESTRC

    • Scope for alternative locations is limited

    • Try to book Saturday and Sunday both if possible, limited by facility availability

  • Saturday vs Sunday Flight test day

    • Doesn’t matter from preparation POV as aircraft should be ready by general on Thursdays

    • Will be helpful if aircraft crashes on Saturday, to have Sunday for preparation

    • Have two week margin if there is damage on the frame/significant harnessing damage

  • Use general meeting as the time to cutoff for aircraft readiness possibly ?

  • RCA

    • So in the past we interpretted this as a technical report

    • in the future we’d like to include the social aspects as well

    • It’s meant to be an entire breakdown

  • We need to follow “these lists” Aidan has made

    • I’m not paying attention as the note taker

    • Flight test request template

  • More meetings tonight to talk about scheduling stuff

  • Stuff on who can fly and when needs to be decided or whatever

  • same with contingency plans on the next flight test ?

  • Icarus meeting is tonight, there’s some discussion on the timeline and availability