These are the primary fails I’ve had over the last quarter.
Glide test fail #1
When we first tested Glide in front of a customer, it lost comms at about 3,000ft and the flight had to be terminated. We had a failure of our tracking antenna as supplied and configured by a consultant. This test, which is a prototype - not product test, was our first, so there was a good bit of slack (the other company competing has now failed 5 tests in a row), but still damaging, especially given that we weren’t even able to drop. Big learning was to not trust consulting firms, even reputable ones for critical systems or timelines.
Glide test Semi-success #2
In our second test, we had a comms issue that caused us to start loosing connection at 10,000ft instead of the 30,000ft mission goal. We initiated an early drop and were able to prove horizontal flight, which was the objective, but the test did not hit the threshold goals. Again, indication to build out our RF org, which we started immediately after this second failure.
Viper 1mo behind schedule
Viper is about a month behind our goal schedule. We knew our dev timelines were hy[er aggressive, but this is unneceptable. I have confidence that we’ll regain it by the end of the year, specifically given that this slack was caused by Jadon’s absence and the move to California, but we need to do everything we can to get back on schedule.
Boston shop closure optics
I should’ve done a much better job mediating the optics of the Boston shop closure. Erik made an announcement on Linkedin that ambiguously made it sound like he was leaving on his own accord. I should’ve gotten out in front of this story, and my failure to do so severely harmed our external perception.
Amsys spend failure
This January, we found out that David Dias, who we terminated last year for not being excellent at his job, had entered into a very poor contract to manage our servers and hardware. This contract, that he signed without his managers knowing, locked us in for 4 years of 100k spend per year. We were able to talk this down and settle with the company without going to court, but it was a scary close call and did end up costing ~100k. We (even before this happened), have put in systems that funnel all spend through the finance org and all legal through the legal org (currently a fractional GC but hiring full time).
Oven lead time failure
I decided to not spend $130k for an oven 2 months ago as looking at the time, the lead times were short. Since, as the need to make more composite airframes globally has heated up, the supply chains have gone from 1 to 6 months. This is currently crippling our ability to do pre-preg composites, greatly increasing the difficulty of producing at our current scales. This is a clear lesson of the pain of underestimating supply chain problems, and is likely going to influence the way we decide to pre-spend capex for ramp.
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