cM :: MORLEY|DIGITAL

My Grandad is a former naval aviator, having reached the rank of Captain before retiring.  He’s also got some great stories, and they’re always well written and very entertaining.  He sent me one about an incident in his early days, and I thought I’d post it up here for you to read:

The Goodyear Corsair

By  CAPT  Stewart T.  Zink,  USN (Ret)

Six hundred hours plus, into a career of more than 5000 flight hours, the ensign and his buddy Al volunteered for duty in or off Korea.  The time frame was July 1950, and the ensign and lieutenant (junior grade) were pilots in an attack squadron, VA-25, stationed at NAF Oceana, flying Skyraiders (now A-1s).  At that time, their nom de plumes were AD-1’s through 4’s, driven by the huge R-3350 engine.

Orders to ferry two AD-3’s to NAS Alameda, CA, came a week later, and the ensign and jg were so ordered, both assuming this was the “go” for Korea.  Getting personal affairs in order and saying “so long” to buddies and girl friends, the two intrepid aviators were soon airborne on their way to NAS Quonset Point to pick up the two AD-3’s.  MCAS Cherry Point was the next destination, then Lawson AFB, NAS Hensley, Biggs AFB, El Toro, then finally NAS Alameda. There weren’t any TACAN stations in those days; one had to get and be able to read maps and find things.

At Alameda there was confusion after landing, and it occurred that new orders were issued.  The intrepid two were told to get a ride to NAF Litchfield Park, find two FG-lD Corsairs (you know, the bent wing type made by Goodyear), and ferry them to NAS Jacksonville.  This was a stunning set of circumstances, but stiff upper lip, and it seemed the French needed the two birds (after overhaul, of course) in French Indochina.  A strange place called Dien Bien Phu needed defending.

Swallowing their disappointment, the crestfallen bummed a ride to the Litchfield airplane bone yard, and were told which two bent wing sets were theirs.  The aircraft inspections were mostly limited to dusting and blowing off sand to find gages, controls, and other parts that maybe should be there.  Amazingly, with some electrical help, the two engines started, permitting a long test flight for each.

So in reverse, it was Biggs, Hensley, Barksdale AFB, then NAS Pensacola.  The landing on Chambers Field, coming in over the Admirals’ housing in a Corsair was somewhat of a hairy thing–with the resulting hard landing by the ensign.  After the flight an inspection revealed no damage.

The next flight leg the following morning was from Pensacola to Jacksonville.  Preflight checks, turn ups, and takeoffs were without problems.  But, half way to Jacksonville, things began to happen to the ensign‘s steed:  the landing gear fell out of their wing wells, and the flaps sagged a bit, as the hydraulic pressure dropped to zero.  A real pickle, but there should be an air bottle under the left side of the pilot’s seat.  This bottle, if filled, can blow the landing gear all the way down and locked.  Investigation of the bottle’s status needs to proceed very soon.

The ensign’s left hand immediately seeks the air bottle’s valve handle.  Found!  Now to turn the handle . . .    Several attempts are made;  the left hand isn’t strong enough, or age and desert have frozen it.  So, one has to get two hands on the valve handle and try again.  But, the FG-1D doesn’t have a floor below the pilot’s seat, and seen well below are the bilges, the bottom of the fuselage.  The control stick is about five feet long.

The ensign explains to the jg that climbing down the stick is in order.  The jg promises to tell the ensign when the stick really needs to be pulled aft in order that a dive earthward doesn’t occur, and flight pay continues to be paid.  The ensign then shinnies down the stick into the bilges, gets two hands on the bottle’s valve handle, and BOOM! Down and locked go the landing gear, and orders are received to immediately pull aft on the stick.

The climb back up the control stick and onto the pilot’s seat is accomplished with amazing alacrity, the aircraft is re trimmed, and both intrepid pilots began breathing normally.  Jacksonville is called to ready their chain gear (arresting gear), and the ensign’s bent wing takes the chain gear without fault, ending an exciting flight.  Things do work.  Even with these Corsairs (probably), the French lost.  The ensign found out about that many years later, in Viet Nam.

One of the differentiators that companies, be they integrators or AIB (add-in-board) partners, use in the PC tech business is their warranties.  And like the herd mentality that’s so prevalent in this business, what one does that’s even slightly successful is quickly duplicated by the rest.

In the AIB business, soon lifetime warranties became commonplace, and even “double lifetime” warranties.  For companies that merely slapped stickers on boards manufactured by someone else, there was little else they could do.

When I spoke to other AIB companies that resisted the option to go to lifetime warranties, their response was simple: “It’s not a sustainable business model, period.   And sooner or later it will come back to bite you in the ass.”

Seemed plausible to me and applicable to the integration side of the business.  PC components will fail.  No matter how much testing you put into a system, you simply cannot predict when a component will go bad over the life of a system.  But it happens.  And when it does, if the system is under warranty, you have to fix it.  And every time that you pick up the phone, replace a part, or send a tech out, that costs you money.

It costs you money to have someone answer that phone call, answer that email, or schedule an on-site tech – and then you have to pay shipping for the part or the system, pay the on-site tech, and then wash, rinse, and repeat if something goes wrong.  Anyone who tells you that they never have to go through this is either lying or hasn’t been in business that long.  Props to EVGA doing the right thing and reigning back in on this.

So when you see a company offering ridiculously low prices, infinite number of configuration choices, and then claim to offer superior customer service for several years free of charge, think twice.  The simple fact is this is unsustainable.  If you do not make enough money on each machine you build to support that customer and future customers it will catch up with you.  Offering infinite configuration choices will compound the issue.  And adding more and more years to your warranty free of charge will bite you in the ass.  I’ve seen it happen.  I’d say ask Monarch Computers if they hadn’t already gone out of business.

It’s coming.  Get ready.  A radical new system that bucks the trend.  There will not be 85 retina-searing LED lights.  This will not look like the head of Voltron.  Aliens had nothing to do with the design.  This will be a monolith of metal and power, a real personal supercomputer.

Get ready.

MAC: Hi, I’m a Mac.

PC: Hi, I’m a PC.

MAC: …

MAC: …

PC: Uh, Mac, that’s your queue – you’re supposed to make snarky comments about me and flat out lie about the PC experience.

MAC: …

PC: Are you ok, Mac?

MAC: …

PC:  Oh, I get it.  You must have logged into your guest account under Snow Leopard.  That deleted all your user data – no wonder you’re at a loss for words.  Did I mention that Windows 7 pwns your face?

Well, we did it – kicked our first Windows 7 systems out the door.  What a helluva feeling.

Rewind nearly 3 years.

I had just jumped back in, headfirst, into systems integration when Vista came out about 6 months later.  Leading up to that I had to juggle doubling production volumes with becoming an OEM partner.  This meant a whole new world of pain as it pertained to deployment and a new set of responsibilities to Microsoft.

I remember getting up really early to switch over the configurators to include the new Vista SKUs.  We were all pretty excited!  A new, fancy OS with a new release of DirectX and new features including Digital Cable.  And sales were doing well!  Then a funny thing happened – people started saying Vista sucked!  We were scratching our heads as we knew that OUR systems didn’t suck – they had fast processors, lots of RAM, fast hard drives, and were extremely stable.  Heck, we even won a few awards!

But unfortunately, when you’re just a multi-million dollar corporation, what you do in a marketplace dominated by multi-billion dollar corporations simply cannot overcome public perception.

The large, multi-national Tier 1s continued to load crapware, bloatware, and shovelware into their PCs, all the while driving prices down by using hardware from the lowest bidder.  Laptops, with already slow mobile HDDs, were RAM starved with 1GB – making the Vista experience unnecessarily painful.  I know, I bought a cheap, throwaway laptop during that time in an emergency situation.  It came with 1GB of RAM.  It was awful.  Throw in 2GB of RAM and it became a new machine.

It was these “captains of industry” that ultimately screwed Vista.  Sure, it had its flaws, and plenty of them.  The problem, however, was that it wasn’t idiot-proof enough for the multi-nationals, who designed to price, not to performance.  Thankfully, Microsoft has stepped up the game, big time, and you’d really have to be a few short of a six pack to screw up a Windows 7 system design.

The bottom line is that Microsoft Windows 7 is the finest consumer operating system on the market, period.

And thanks to Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, along with cheap memory prices, the hardware out there gives the Tier 1s no excuse for any PC to deliver the same lack-luster performance that many commodity configurations delivered in 2007 and 2008.

With all the momentum that Windows 7 is getting, you’re going to see a resurgence - not just of the PC, but of the boutique.  MAINGEAR will be leading it, you can count on that.