What's new Emil Stache Emil Stache worked as a manager for Teledyne Relays in California. A Vietnam veteran, he was concerned that the company was selling unreliable weapon systems parts to the military. Here is an edited version of his story as told to a Senate subcommittee in 1993. For more than six years, I was employed as the manager of quality engineering and reliability by Teledyne Relays.
Relays are electronic switches.
Teledyne's were used in the space shuttle, military satellites and in a wide array of our most sophisticated weapons systems including the Nike nuclear missile and the Patriot missile. Life testing is supposed to demonstrate how reliable the relay is over the life of the product. The manufacturer is required to subject its relays to hundreds of thousands of operations without failure to demonstrate the reliability of its product. Every six months, the manufacturer must submit a report of its test results to the Defense Electronic Supply Center. When I arrived, the monitoring lights that indicated whether relays were operative or had failed these test were not even hooked up.