I hope to produce the plane in one place on a tight time-table:

FIRST to plan out every pound and dollar in the project,

THEN be sure the pounds, dollars, and performance of the plane are what I want,

THEN be sure the funding is 100% in place,

THEN get 100% of the parts ordered and delivered,

THEN go through a time-compressed marathon build-process with the experts,

THEN be able to make more planes if the market calls for it,

THEN be able to track every plane we sell, so that is any plane goes over-limit on any system, we notify the owner, and if any plane goes DOWN, we call for help for them.

This is how I plan to plan, sell, build, train, test, and support more planes, IF I, and many others in the world, like the plane enough:

1: One-time: I will set up shop in a hangar in some cheap leased space at a small airport and build a handful of mini assembly-lines for the plane. These mini-assembly lines are called 'bays'.

2: Per-customer: The customer will place an order, and WE will get 100% of the parts, and do 49% of the construction, immediately BEFORE the customer shows up at the shop. When the customer shows up he will go to assembly-line station 1 and work with the expert at assembly-line station 1 to start his airplane. Once he and the employee have finished assembly-line station 1, the plane will physically move down the line, with the customer, to assembly-line station 2. A different employee will be there that is expert at the functions needed at station-2, and is therefore able to RAPIDLY help the customer go through the steps at assembly-line station 2. And so on. Doing the job this way, we will have efficiency close to production-line speed and quality, but with no certification costs since the customer will be doing 51% of the work as a home-builder.

3: Ongoing: We will have facilities at the airport, built right into the hangar, for customers to live while they build the plane. Since the operation is set up like an assembly-lines, with professionals guiding the builders down the line, the builder is acting almost like an employee... living on-site (no hotel cost, no rental-car cost), putting in long days to crank through the production. Everything is completed on-site except the paint. He flies the plane away when done.

This technique should:

->avoid certification costs,

->give the economies of scale and quality control approaching those of a factory,

->give the customer the experience of helping build his plane.

By having the customer living on-site, cost for the customer is kept to a minimum... it is like being at a university or flying-school... the jet-building school!

This technique will require that:

->We know every single part in the airplane, right down to the last nut and bolt, so we can have them all ready the moment the customer shows up.

->We know every single dollar of cost in acquisition of the facility, monthly operation of the facility, and per-aircraft production.

->We know every customer and part needed to build the airplane, all scheduled and arriving at the right time to drop into assembly-line station-1 just as the previous customer vacates it for station-2!

Dropping the ball in the planning of the inventory, production-lines, and customer-arrival and build-process will ruin this business.

To accomplish this technique:

To accomplish this in an organized fashion, we need a computer program to manage all this, so I wrote one. (screenshots below)

This inventory-management program lets us enter every nut and bolt in the airplane with the cost, weight, and location of each part, as well as the supplier contact information for each part. As the Wizard of Oz secretly hides behind a mask to drive the Emerald City, this program is called WIZARD, and it tracks and manages every facet of the company, so that everything is planned, organized, and constantly measured and evaluated. If ANYTHING EVER goes wrong in the company, from the tiniest glitch in an airplane to even one minute of wasted time by a customer or emplyee, we will figure out what needs to be done to keep it from ever happening again, and modify WIZARD to help schedule and watch that element of the company to prevent that error from happening again. All employees at the management level will routinely consult the WIZARD to see what customers are scheduled, what parts are needed, what company checkbook balance is called for, what inventory is called for, what operating costs and profits are, what time, parts, and money are required to build an aiplane, and even where every airplane in the fleet is at any given moment. Every day, every management-level employee (and especically myself!) will see the Wonderful Wizard to see how all inventory, scheduling, and production is progressing. Right now, I think that having all the right parts and tools in place at just the right time, and production processes streamlined as much as possible, is the critical element to making this work. Customers need to be able to show up and work down the asseembly-line with their airplane and fly out in 90 days or less (preferably 30)... and having the most streamlined production process, assembly-line production, and availablity of all parts and all tools at all times is critical to making this possible. Even one missing part or tool will stop an assembly line... and this is exactly the type of nincompoopery that will sink the company and ruin things for the customer if allowed to happen. Every part must be available when needed, and the Wizard will tell us what needs to be ordered, and when.

Once every part of the plane has been entered into WIZARD, we will see the total cost, weight, and center of gravity of the airplane, as well as a recipe for the parts required to build more, with the contact-source for getting more of each part. This lets us see in advance how much the plane will weigh and cost, and who to contact for more parts if we build more planes later. As well, the Wizard lets us enter the parts on-hand as inventory, compares the inventory on-hand to the number of parts required to build an airplane, and tells us if we need to order more parts. The app also lets us enter the total list of stuff needed to equip the shop (with cost per item) and the monthly cost to run the shop as well (to give us the total monthly cost of the operation, absent production of any planes). Finally, the app keeps track of all the customers of the company, and schedules the production bays, showing what people are lined up for each bay, and when each bay will become available for new customers. We enter the production time for each airplane here and the people in line for each production-bay. This gives us the date to tell each customer to arrive for work, and the date the NEXT prospective customer can plan on arriving to start his plane.

This is one simple, quick-loading, fast-moving, light-weight program that is a SNAP to use, but could save thousands of hours and millions of dollars if used properly to manage the project, I think.

The Wizard requires a Macintosh with a nice big monitor.

OK let's go through the various facets of this app: We start below with the one-time cost of building the SHOP.

This is the first thing we start filling out, entering the items we need to have in the shop to build airplanes, with a unit-cost and qty of each item. The Wizard adds them all up to give us the start-up cost of equipping the shop. All data is updated in real-time.. the total cost updates as you enter new data. The scroll-bar on the right lets you enter an unlimited number of items to equip the shop in a user-friendly fashion and scroll up and down to see them all.

Next we go to our MONTHLY shop expenses... these are the expenses that do not have anything to do with the number of planes we build... this gives us our monthly overhead.

NOW it starts to get fun.

Below, we see the GROUPS in the PLANE (wing shell, wing flight controls, etc), PARTS in each GROUP (aileron pushrod system, ailerons, etc), and ITEMS required to build each part (labor, pushrods, etc).

We simply click on the items at RIGHT ("MARKETPLACE") to drag them into the "ITEMS IN THE PART" ("AIRPLANE"). Each time we click on one of the "ITEMS IN THE MARKETPLACE" it drops into the "ITEMS IN THE PART", of course, and the airplane gets a little heavier and more expensive as the weight and cost is added. The parts-count grows. The center of gravity is updated as well since the longitudinal location of each item is entered as well. Note the contact info for each part alongside the unit cost and weight. If a bidder will fill this out completely as part of the design-process, then he can easily communicate many of the requirements to build the airplane to me without a million annoying emails and phone-calls. This is one app that lets you think through every single bit of the airplane, adding up all the parts, with the cost, weight, location, and contact information for each part, so you can see the total cost, weight, center of gravity, parts-count, and source-list for new parts BEFORE the first part is ever ordered!

THIS is what will let a bidder order ALL of the parts to build an airplane BEFORE I show up to start working on it!

It is also what will let ME order ALL of the parts for MY customers before THEY show up to start working on THEIR plane!

Once all of the airplane parts have been entered, each with a weight, cost, and location, the total airplane cost, weight, and CG are displayed, along with the list of total part-count at left. As you can see I have not entered all the parts yet... this airplane still thinks it will weight 401 pounds and cost me less than $39,000! Needless to say, plenty more parts still have to be entered! As well, we can print reports listing all the parts to find both the total cost of the plane, and the total weight and balance. Remember that we can enter labor as an 'item' on each part, so the cost of the plane DOES include labor... even though this 'item' has no weight.

Now that we have evaluated the plane, we keep track of our customers.

And now that we have our parts ordered and airplane designed, we schedule the production bays... 3 of them here, with the first 2 in use. Each customer is scheduled for the best estimate of the time it will take him to do the job, and the schedule runs on out from there as new people are added to the line. Note below that mario foodlebonger is scheduled for 90 days... 30 days more than the rest. He is a bit older and slower, so he gets some extra time. The person who schedules can easily see everything that is going on here with a few mouse-clicks.. she can also cut people in line, knock them out of line, etc. This is an eye-blink response to the question: "When will I get to show up to build my airplane?"

Then, when done with scheduling for each customer, we go to the "DAILY" tab and enter the parts-on-hand, based on our daily (or weekly?) inventory... the app will tell us what we are missing, giving a quick heads-up to the master-of-inventory.

And now the checkbook-register well!!! As odd as it seems, it makes perfect sense... it is a single app that knows the ingredients of the airplane, and manages the flow of people and parts and money into and out of the company... with everything presented in an amazingly user-friendly format so the whole airplane-production situation is visible at-a-glance. Since the app knows the cost per plane, and the monthly expenses, and the per-airplane expense, and the number of customers in line, and when they are scheduled to show up, it is one app you can run to keep track of the company! (or, such is my goal).

And, finally, we TRACK each plane. Every plane has a transmitter that transmits it's location and flight-params satellites overhead, which then transmit that data back down to Laminar Research. This will let us notify the customer if any limit is exceeded, send help if any plane goes down, and have a black box in a secure location if any accident occurrs. Using technology designed to track children and Alzheimers patients (!!!) that fits in a WRIST-WATCH (!!!), this technology is amazingly lo-cost and lo-power and lo-size and lo-weight. This exact hardware and software will be used for flight-test, as well. In that sense, every single flight of the airplane is treated as seriously as a test-flight. The software is shown below with randomly-generated data... next step will be to collect data from the actual airplane!

Here is the Wizard in flight-test mode, showing the results that we can watch from the ground in flight-test:

Here is the Wizard in fleet-tracking mode, showing the last time each plane in the fleet has flown, and letting you select any plane for viewing his flight in real-time.

This lets us send help if we think an accident occurred, notify the customer if a limit has been exceeded, and, perhaps, tell the customer when his engine-inspections, annual, etc, are due.

So there you have it.. a SINGLE app that does everything from weight and balance to production-scheduling and inventory-management to flight-testing and then fleet-tracking and secure black-box storage.

I will add whatever I have to to this app to make it more useful, and that may be plenty since I have never done anything remotely like this before! But my hope is that whoever designs the plane will fill this program out in intimate detail, with every part in the plane, and the contact info for every part, simply using ME as the first customer!!!! If whoever designs the plane uses the Wizard to do the design, using me as the first customer, then they will be filling out the program with the accurate data for me to get OTHER customers in the near future! As well, if the Wizard is as good as I claim, then they can use it to predict the airplane cost, weight, and CG, and have all the parts ready before I show up for my build-process, and furnish me with all the contact-info for me to get more parts without having to bug them by email or phone later.