Reliability, Quality, and NDT—Keys to Soldier Satisfaction

Abstract

<p>I have been asked to speak about reliability, quality engineering, quality assurance, and nondestructive testing. The nondestructive testing part has really gotten to me, and I'll address that at the end of the little talk. I get myself quite upset when I visit contractors, upset with myself when I was a contractor. You come in and you get a wiring diagram of the corporation. Here's a reliability organization and here's the quality assurance or.ganization. Here's an Rand D group, and here's the production engineering group, and it sort of sounds like everybody is running their own corporation. Being an old-fashioned engineer, I was brought up to believe and understand that you design reliability into the equipment in the first place. Of course, my experience was limited to vacuum tubes and discrete components qnd none of this sexy stuff of solid state physics and MOS and LSI devices. When you designed a circuit and you looked at the worst case power requirement and current flow and somebody said "you're going to have to deal with this kind of a range of ambient temperature," you derated a resistor. This meant that if it had to dissipate an eighth of a watt, you might decide to put a half watt resistor in th~re and you provide enough space so that it would fit in and some cooling air around it and maybe a little heat sink and the equipment worked very, very well.</p>