The following is from a September 2008 interview of Steve Schultz of Ion Aircraft. It was done by Paul Anderson for an EAA chapter on-line newsletter and is reproduced with permission.
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What has been the high point of the project for you? The first flight of the prototype?
It surprises most people, but no, the first flight was more of a relief than anything else. Once you fly the project moves into a totally different chapter. It legitimizes everything you have done to that point. I think the high point for me is ongoing—I have made some great friends during the course of the project, guys who have really sacrificed and put their blood, sweat, tears and money into it without complaint. Those relationships are tremendously rewarding to me.
What is the most important thing you have learned during your project?
You absolutely, positively cannot let yourself fall in love with your own ideas. As soon as you fall in love with an idea you begin to defend it. That’s the wrong way to look at an idea. The first thing you need to do with an idea is put it in the arena and see if it can be killed. If you come to me with an idea, I am going to try to kill it. It’s not malicious, it’s not personal, and it’s not a game. Some very dumb things have been done that did not reveal themselves to be dumb until months or years after the fact. If an idea can’t be killed it may eventually turn out to be a good idea. Folks have to learn to work with that mind set.
Does that mean you are a perfectionist?
Not even close. “Perfection is the enemy of good enough” is an old saying and it is true. You can’t insist that an idea be perfect—we would never get anything done if we really wanted perfection. If we have problem A and an idea solves that problem but in turn creates problem B we are no better off. An idea has to work on a lot of levels or it isn’t a solution, it’s just a band-aid.
Has anyone ever gotten upset when their pet idea is rejected?
Sure, there has been some pouting at times. I have had maybe 1% of my own ideas make it into the plane and I have been known to whine a little bit when one of my ideas bites the dust. You get used to it. Your skin gets thicker. You just have to move on and have a better idea.
So what do you do if there isn’t a good enough idea?
I go find someone smarter. Or someone more experienced. Or someone with no idea what I’m talking about so they can make random suggestions that sometimes turn out to be brilliant. In one case we copied a design from a plane that was made in 1929. When all else fails we put the problem on the shelf for a while and go work on something else. When we come back later we can usually see something we didn’t see before.
You have achieved a great deal without spending as much money as projected. How did you do that?
The short answer is by being slow. The longer answer is we made a virtue out of being undercapitalized. You cannot waste what you don’t have. I know that sounds odd, but it’s true—lemonade out of lemons type of thinking. Since day one we have had to be extremely strategic in how we spent money. ‘If I spend this dollar, does it really advance the project? Can I advance the project similarly without spending the dollar?’ The opposite way of thinking is to throw money at a problem. We have never had that option, so we have to solve problems by being creative or working our asses off. Usually both.
The former CEO of Eclipse once gave a talk in which he stated that one of the major mistakes in aviation is to start a project undercapitalized. I thought that was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. It’s not like people WANT to start without a ton of cash, it’s not exactly part of any business plan. I don’t think there has ever been a project in the history of aviation that has started with enough money. Civilian, military, name it. They always get X percent done and then need more cash. The folks that are really good are the ones that get it done in two rounds of financing instead of three or five or more.
Specifically how does being slow help save money?
I’ll give two examples. First, it allows us to do a lot of the work ourselves, often just me and a few other guys and we are working for free. Second, and more strategically, there are opportunities to spend money to speed something up but it eventually backfires. For example we could pay to get a part laser cut, which is fast and convenient, only to later find that we end up changing the part or even getting rid of it. So we got our part quickly but it ended up being a waste of money. If we made that same part by hand it took a lot longer but it didn’t hurt as much when we changed the part later.
Another example is something like Oshkosh. There is a lot of temptation to throw money at the project in the weeks leading up to Oshkosh—to finish some part or to make something pretty or whatever the case may be. If you were to graph our expenditures you would find they spike right before Oshkosh. So let us say that we spend X dollars to make a deadline, like Oshkosh. Fine, we made a deadline. But now the deadline has passed and we’ve pissed away money for something that is not actually advancing the project.
So why do you go to Oshkosh if it is expensive and doesn’t advance your project?
Believe me, we’ve talked about skipping Osh. But the stone-cold reality is that there is a certain minimum expectation in the market, and that expectation is that you go to Osh every summer to show signs of life. Period. If you don’t go the automatic assumption is that you are a goner and that assumption often becomes reality even if it isn’t warranted.
Aside from that, in the end it is valuable to go to Osh for non-tangible reasons. We get tons of positive feedback from folks at the show, which is good for morale. We sometimes forget that what we are doing is actually really cool. We also get some face-to-face with other vendors and that is important. 99% of the people in this industry are very high quality folks and we get a lot out of talking to them and working with some of them.
Even competitors?
My personal belief is that competition in aviation is not like competition in most other businesses. Specifically, I think that either a person likes your airplane or they don’t. If they don’t like it you are never going to change their mind, and if they do like it you just have to make sure you meet expectations. With that in mind, yes, we often really enjoy talking to competitors. They are often very nice people, and when it comes down to it no one in the world knows the pain of developing a new airplane except someone who has done it. In that sense we have a common bond.
Is it painful to develop a new airplane?
You have no idea.
What makes it so painful?
On any given day you can come up against a problem that is totally unforeseen, is going to take gobs of time to fix and is going to cost more money than you actually have in the bank. Or you can’t buy some common simple part because you are going to use it in aviation. Or something you spent five days laboriously making by hand doesn’t work and you don’t know why. Or your wing gets nailed by the fuel truck and has extensive leading edge damage and they won’t take responsibility for it. There have been days where all of those things happened on the same day.
You mentioned that changes can be frustrating. Talk about that a little bit.
It often takes us anywhere from one to four weeks to make a change to the airplane. When we test the change it might have made an improvement or might have made something worse. Sometimes we make a change and nothing happens, which is the greatest frustration of all. I have friends in software who can make and test three changes before lunch. I get a little jealous.
Changes also have a ripple effect. Everything on an airplane has an effect on everything else. You usually cannot change one thing without having to modify five other things. It’s like a chess game . . . you have to think many moves ahead.
Additionally there are some hurdles that just will not go away. For example, we’ve been kicking around the issue of a boarding step for a couple of years now and we still don’t have a solution that we really like. There are several ideas on the table that will work but they aren’t really satisfying. They all have one flaw or another that is fairly stinky.
And of course the money thing. That’s a constant source of frustration.
Is it important that an idea be satisfying?
It doesn’t have to be, but once you get a solution that is obviously the RIGHT solution you feel a sense of satisfaction that gives you little thrill. Sometimes an idea just clicks into place and you know in your gut that you are done with that problem. Which can be really painful when you have to change it a few months down the road because of some unrelated issue, like we talked about a moment ago.
What is something that you wish you could change?
There is a joke in aviation that the best material to use is unobtanium. Unobtanium is sometimes jargon for titanium but it’s really a reference to the fact that there is no perfect aviation material. Between the two of them, carbon fiber and aluminum cover a lot of bases but they are by no means perfect.
Light, cheap, strong. Pick only two. It’s that simple. For any given part or structure, two of those factors have to take primacy over the third. You want something cheap and strong? It’s going to be heavy. You want something strong and light? It’s going to be expensive. You have to make a three-axis decision for every part, prioritizing the relationship between strength, weight and cost for all of the ways you can make that part. I wish I could change that. I also wish I was a 25 year old rock star.
Is aviation more difficult than your previous businesses?
Absolutely. It is simply a much higher mountain to climb. The barriers to success are greater. The market is unforgiving. But meeting those challenges is also more rewarding.
How is the market unforgiving?
On any given day you are one innocent decision away from being viewed as a good guy or a villain. People treat your every word as a guarantee, and at the same time this seems to be an industry in which some folks subconsciously want you to lie to them.
What do you mean by that?
The plane is what it is and you can’t start telling people otherwise just because that is what they want to hear. The word we hate is ‘version.’ As in, ‘can you make a version that does X.’ No, we don’t have a 300 knot version. No, we don’t have a version with a 1,500 pound useful load. No, we don’t have a version with a 1,200 mile range. No, we don’t have a three-seat version. No, we can’t put two engines on it. If those are things you want there are other planes out there we can suggest. In fact, I once walked a guy from our booth at Oshkosh to another vendor who had a plane that did what he wanted it to do. He did not like their plane, but it had the numbers he wanted.
Did the other vendor appreciate what you did?
He bought me lunch.
What advice would you give to others?
First—you must ruthlessly maintain a positive attitude. If your attitude slips for even a second you’re toast. I do NOT mean that you should delude yourself; you can’t go around talking yourself into believing that dog turds are really made of chocolate. There are plenty of those guys in aviation. I am talking about pure attitude.
Second, ask questions. Ask more questions. Ask questions until you can’t talk any more. Aviation is an incredibly small industry, there are very few people working in this field that you can’t get on the phone with only a small effort. Most of them are happy to answer questions if you ask them the right way. No one knows everything, so cast your net wide. On that same note we always answer questions if we are asked. I am not one of those guys who believes that helping someone else somehow detracts from my own project. I do not mind sharing.
Third, research. Avoid reinventing the wheel. You can’t be prideful and think that you are the first smart guy to have faced some particular issue. Odds are high that someone hit the same snag 50 or 70 years ago and solved it then. The history of aviation is very well documented, almost everything has had a book written about it. Inspiration is only a Google search away. By the same token, don’t repeat other people’s mistakes. It is amazing how often people try the same flawed ideas generation to generation. I don’t mean that you should not try to advance the state of the art, I mean that basic physics have not changed over time.
What was the biggest surprise of the project?
I never anticipated that I would live in Oregon for a year and half to work on the project. I ended up renting an apartment and the whole deal. That was a pretty big surprise.
Would you do it again?
With the knowledge I have now I would do several things differently, but overall yes, I would do it again.
