RC Sailplanes Can Improve Your Work Performance
Posted by Bill Kuhl on Nov 2, 2002, 00:13
|
Based on no scientific evidence that I know of, but one can only hope this is true, at least it helps you justify the time and money spent on your hobby. No doubt many of the skills valuable for RC sailplanes, could benefit us in other facets of or lives. The best part of this deal is that you have the motivation to improve in your hobby.
Although many analogies could probably be made between skills in hobby and employment, I will focus on three areas; efficiency, critical time, and failure.
Efficiency
Efficiency - doing more with less, raising the bar. With lift a limited resource, we are always trying to improve the efficiency of our sailplanes. Even if we are flying on a huge slope with mucho lift, we still want our sailplane to go faster which relates to efficiency. Closely related to efficiency, is accuracy, another important component in sailplane success. With misalignments degrading performance and with the cost of scrapping expensive materials, we become very accurate over time.
Efficiency is all-important in the work environment, the term is used extensively in the manufacturing but is related to almost every area. Time, materials, and manpower have to be used in an efficient manner. When products are designed, efficiency must be a prime concern of the designer; energy efficiency relates to a whole host of factors that sailplaners must consider too; such as weight and drag.
Critical Time
Sailplane pilots are always considering time; how long they have been up, how long they have to get down. Even if you don't fly contests, no doubt you time at least time some of your flights. When you are building that expensive sailplane and only have a limited time to have everything aligned before the glue starts to setup, you quickly learn how valuable some blocks of time can be and learn to plan ahead.
In business, "time is money" and there are those critical times when you can make or loose large sums of money. I can easily relate to this with my computer work, normally there is a limited window when a computer system can be down, and as much as possible I want to test phases of the change before actually doing a switch over. In this situation if things do not go right, many people can be mad at you.
There are so many situations like this, such as paying for expensive consultants, shutting down production because of a lack of parts. Or businesses when you have most of your customers during a peak period of time, like department stores just before Christmas.
Failure Can be Bad
Although many people consider the prospect of crashing and destroying your sailplane beyond repair devastating, experienced sailplane pilots learn how to deal with it and take measures to prevent this from happening. In assessing risks for failure, you learn where are the critical areas.
With model sailplanes, high structural stresses are often placed on the planes. We learn how to build our sailplanes very strong in the critical areas; we work to perfect our radio installations including linkages for maximum reliability. When we are flying our sailplanes we constantly think about the danger levels we are placing on our sailplanes. Should it be able to make it back to the field after being downwind if the wind dropped, could it make it back flying over a rocky slope, or will the contest winch break your wing if you don't tap quickly enough.
Failure on the job can be even worse as this is how we pay for our sailplane addiction. Enough said on that.
So go ahead and purchase that thousand-dollar molded sailplane, it will be more efficient, you will be more aware of critical time when gluing in the expensive components, and when it comes apart while DS'ing, you will be super motivated to learn about the failure.
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- |
