[Seahawk]

Mike,

Nice. Well done.

I have done a lot of lean projects in production flight test environments (new and rebuilt aircraft). I always find it interesting the simple things that are uncovered during the analysis phase of the lean project.

My favorite was aircraft painting: At Sikorsky they painted the aircraft before flight test, just after they completed "high bay" QA.

During the production flight test discovery, we found that the average aircraft had at least $15k in over and above charges to fix and repair painting problems: blemishes, scratches, etc.

We moved the final paint process to just before delivery to the customer.

O&A charges for paint dropped to less than 1K per helo.