The Japanese view a defect as a gem, a treasure, to be nurtured, cared for, expensively cultivated to make it yield its secret. And last, TPM, or Total Preventive Maintenance, evident by its name alone. The sad learning from all of this is that Americans, and especially in old plants, develop sloppy habits. The good news is that they can be fixed. My second topic is cost.
Airplanes are expensive.
Stated another way, aircraft capital cost has about doubled as a portion of aircraft direct operating and capital cost over the course of the jet age. As a wag put it, this is the second highest cost escalating function in our country over the last forty years, after only a college education. We can do better, and again we learn from the Japanese. This time it s process reengineering, sometimes called lean production, continuous improvement, or the Toyota Production Method. We did and are doing the typical corporate restructuring over the last five years.