Initial Operating Capability (IOC) – the point in a program’s life when the system achieves sufficient functionality to be usefully deployed.

The Mentoring Committee has been relentlessly charging forward towards the unleashing of the SAWE Mentoring Program at the Cocoa Beach Conference.  The first Mentors have volunteered, the committee has committed to the Charter, the website is nearly complete, and the Mentor Application is online.  Currently the committee is deep into testing the methodology of Mentor/Mentee matching, using a Mentee Application that will soon be online for the general SAWE population to utilize.  At that point, the SAWE Mentoring Program will officially go truly live.

We desire more veteran Mass Properties Practitioners to volunteer as Mentors.  This is easy to do, using the online form at https://www.sawe.org/training/mentoring/ and clicking the Apply as a Mentor button.  Shortly before the Cocoa Beach Conference, the companion Apply as a Mentee button will also become active.  Mentees can then be matched with suitable Mentors, and the transfer of knowledge that is the lifeblood of the SAWE can begin.

The SAWE Mentoring Program is unique to the SAWE – no other organization has the breadth of experience or has the span of weights-related tasks as those performed by SAWE members working in the complex field of mass properties.  Our membership spans the globe and has members in every endeavor that employ mass properties personnel.  Some of those have years of experience they can share, while others need to gain the knowledge required to acquire this experience.  The SAWE Mentoring Program will meld these two forces, creating a knowledgeable workforce that benefits both the individual members and their organizations.  And although invaluable, it won’t cost a member a single cent, as this is just one of the benefits of SAWE membership.

Be On the Look Out (BOLO in law enforcement lingo) for the rollout of the SAWE Mentoring Program.  It will be complete by the opening of the 82nd International Conference on Mass Properties on May 20, 2023 in Cocoa Beach Florida.  Those who will be attending can witness this rollout as a special presentation on Monday, May 23rd, and any member can sign on as a Mentor or Mentee when the rollout commences.

It’s Alive!  Unlike Dr. Frankenstein’s protégé’s creation in Ingolstadt, this is nothing to fear – “It” is the SAWE Mentoring Webpage [https://www.sawe.org/training/mentoring/].  The Mentoring webpage is the newest part of the SAWE’s membership career development initiative.

First, please note that the Mentee application is not yet live, however, the rest of the page is.

A lot has happened behind the scenes to make it possible to go (mostly) live with the webpage.  The Mentoring Charter has been through extensive review by the Mentoring Committee.  The webpage itself has also been created and tested.  The committee created a set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s).  An application form for Mentors is up and running, as we need mentors available before we can match Mentees with Mentors.  Solicitations to specially chosen senior SAWE mass properties engineers have been sent out – they are now able to formally apply as Mentors using the web-based form (and utilize a special template to formulate their input prior to filling out the web-based application form).

Still to come, of course, is a companion application for Mentees.  Along with this will be a “behind the scenes” means of matching Mentees with appropriate Mentors, as well as metrics to track relationships, completion status, and effectiveness of the program as created.

A Mentoring Logo depicting the “Passing the Torch” with the SAWE Wings and program name is prominent on the webpage as well as a link to current committee membership and a contact form.  Along with the contact form, a special email address (mentoring@sawe.org) is also live.

Watch for further developments to come, with emphasis on this latest career development program becoming fully active by Cocoa Beach.

Let’s say you are a mass properties engineer faced with solving a problem you have not seen before.  Chances are that this has been something that someone else has already seen.  Wouldn’t it be splendid if you could consult with a person with experience, who could support you in finding a solution to your problem?

Or let’s turn this around.  An engineer has a problem.  You’ve seen and handled this problem in the past.  You could help the other engineer – IF you were aware that they could use your help.

How do these two hypothetical engineers discover each other – the one with the problem and the one with solutions?  It is highly unlikely that pure chance will put the two together.  In fact, they might not know each other.

Enter The SAWE Mentoring Program.  This program, currently under development, will act to engage Mentors (those with knowledge) with Mentees (those who desire to obtain knowledge).  For this to work, the SAWE will be soliciting Mentors who are willing and able to aid in transferring knowledge to Mentees, via a Mentor/Mentee matching process that will bring those seeking solutions in contact with those who know solutions.  We will open a portal for mentees to describe their problem and solicit help.  The SAWE will then endeavor to match suitable Mentor/Mentee pairs.

The SAWE has set a goal of rolling the program out and be up and running by the opening of the Cocoa Beach Conference in May 2023.

More information will be forthcoming as the program development matures.

The SAWE is proud to present our 9th Virtual Forum, a panel and audience participation venue to inform and debate important issues in mass properties engineering.  This forum’s topic is Mass Properties Uncertainty Analysis, and our panelists are John Nakai from The Aerospace Corporation and Robert Zimmerman, Technical Director of the SAWE.  The Forum will be via Google Meet and will run for an hour and a half commencing on Friday, January 27th at 12:00 EST (11:00 CST, 10:00 MST, 9:00 PST, 14:00 BRT, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET).

The forum will start with differentiating mass growth from mass properties uncertainties, then it will delineate sources of mass properties uncertainties.  The “meat” of the forum will concentrate on three inter-related uncertainty questions asked by working mass properties engineers:  How do you determine uncertainty ranges?  How do you characterize uncertainty?  And how do you compute uncertainties?  Next, because of various constraints, some uncertainties may be determined in a coordinate system that is not the project’s preferred coordinates, so a brief discussion with references to SAWE papers will point to how to treat rotated uncertainties.  The formal presentation will conclude by summarizing uncertainty modeling techniques.

Questions may be raised during the presentation and following the presentation the floor will be open for general discussion.

Registration will be required and will open in early January.

Coming to the Oct 28th forum for SAWE in the Hydrogen Economy? Don’t forget H2, atomic No. 1.008 aka 10/08 – is National Hydrogen Day! https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/celebrate-national-hydrogen-and-fuel-cell-day-department-energy and if you’re looking for a great primer on the looming hydrogen economy check out this hour long video from Caterpillar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pI6JNUf5ek

https://www.space.com/rosie-rocketeer-dummy-boeing-starliner-oft-2

Certified.  I am a Certified Mass Properties Engineer.  I have taken the test and I passed.

Why?  After all, I am retired, nearly a septuagenarian, unlikely to be employed again, particularly as a mass properties engineer.  Right now, you can count the number of Certified Mass Properties Engineers on the fingers of one hand.  We few are the vanguard, the first of many to come.  We set the example, and that example will bring an understanding by both those certified and those who desire informed mass properties engineers that there is a basic knowledge required to be an effective mass properties engineer.

My professional journey began in the 1970’s, a time of stagflation, disco and polyester, and general malaise.  I had a technical degree (Physics) and a desire to be in aerospace.  I interviewed at several companies in Wichita, got multiple offers, and chose a company that offered subsidized flight training, as I always wanted to fly.  I started in the Weight Control group, and began calculating weight, CG, and MOI of parts, which then got integrated into a database that modeled a new aircraft.  Mathematically, the work was interesting.  As I showed ability, I was given more complicated tasks, including running plots of CG vs fuel burn, landing gear kinematics, and control surface mass properties.  I was also taking flying lessons.

My instructor, Jim, was a big man, pushing 300 pounds.  When he sat in the plane, he took all of his seat and part of mine.  Calculations showed that with full fuel, the aircraft we flew was overweight.  Nevertheless, up we went on flight after flight.  Then came the big day, my first solo, three times around the pattern, three take-offs, three landings.  Jim got out, I taxied to the end of the runway, pushed the throttle in, and I was suddenly in control of something unfamiliar.  Acceleration was, well – not brisk, but peppier than I was used to.  Climbing out, I saw climb rates much higher than I’d seen in all the times I’d flown this plane, reaching pattern altitude before reaching downwind.  And the descent to landing was shallower, to the point that I landed much farther down the runway than I had intended.  The next two circuits were similar, except I anticipated the descent rate better.

It was a revelation – what I was doing for my job was not some mathematical exercise – there were real-world consequences tied to mass properties.  I began paying attention to physical objects, subconsciously calibrating the mass properties of my world.  Length times width times height times density equals weight.  Where’s the CG of that car, vertically and front to back?  What does it weigh?  Conversely, I started the long process of seeing how a design evolves, how the different pieces fit together and what drives design decisions.  For example, the horizontal tail of an aircraft in level flight provides a downforce sufficient to equal the moment that the CG has driving the nose down about the center of lift.  How much structure is required so that this downforce tilts the aircraft without bending it?  That, plus margins drive the weight of that structure.  Over time, that became wondering how to minimize the weight without compromising some other aspect.

I changed companies and went to work in the space world – rockets and spacecraft.  Now there was another aspect added – POI.  The three-dimensional placement of individual components became important.  I learned to visualize the consequences of component placement on axis misalignment.  My second spinning spacecraft drove me to improve on the process I’d been taught.  That process utilized a program that required multiple computer runs to adjust positions, check the resulting POI’s, calculate the misalignments which then could be compared to the requirement.  I created a spreadsheet that combined all the calculations and would instantly give me the result from any change.  This had two unexpected consequences.  One, since it was fairly early in the proposal phase, I was free to experiment with component placement.  My first run of the spreadsheet, with the parts where the designers had placed them was well outside the pointing requirement.  I visualized what I was seeing spinning about and realized that if I moved a couple of components that the majority of the misalignment would go away.  I presented this concept to the team, and the chief scientist came up to me and said this solved one of his most perplexing problems.  With this as the new baseline, then it became a matter of small adjustments of other components to meet the pointing requirement.  Then came the second surprise – when we turned the proposal in to the customer, the customer was so impressed with my automated solution they requested it be given to them.

I continued my career.  People I’d worked with on one program I ran across on other programs.  I had one program director tell me “The aerospace community is small.  You can move around and meet almost everyone, or you can stay at one company and they’ll come by and meet you.”  I stayed at one company, and quite a few of those I’d worked with became leads, managers, people in high places.  And they knew me and asked for me when there were tough mass properties problems.  And this was because I had the knowledge and experience, and the people in charge knew that I had the knowledge and experience.

Today, things are different in one key aspect – there is much more turmoil in the workplace.  Fewer and fewer mass properties engineers spend their career at one company.  Those that have done so are nearing retirement or have retired.  Today’s mass properties engineer probably don’t have the luxury of long association with people in high places that have first-hand knowledge of a mass properties engineer’s experience.  Nor do they have a way to determine if their engineers actually have the knowledge to do their job.

That is until now.  The SAWE has instituted a Certified Mass Properties Engineer program.  The first few adventurous engineers have successfully passed the certification exam.  The exam itself tests an applicant’s knowledge and understanding of mass properties.  Now we have a means to objectively show management and customers that an engineer has the required knowledge to perform in a mass properties role.  This should bring confidence to customers, employers, and employees alike, that engineers know what they are doing.

Right now there is no requirement that a mass properties engineer be certified, no requirement from a customer that a company’s engineering staff include certified engineers.  But that could and should change as more engineers get certified, and the supervisors, employers and customers gain confidence in knowing that there is a standard to which their engineers strive to meet.

Circling back to the beginning – why should anyone get certified?  Two reasons immediately spring to mind, depending on where you are in your career.  If you are new or relatively new, certification will bolster your confidence and bolster your employers’ confidence in you.  And that bodes well for you career.  If you are an experienced engineer, certification also bolsters your confidence and your employer’s confidence, but it also places you on the path to mentorship.  Mentoring others not only helps the mentee, but also boosts the mentor both mentally and within the eyes of your employer.  And for someone like me, past the employment stage, it is that certification institutionalizes the mentoring relationships that I may have.

Picture this scenario – an internal or external customer contacts a team, possibly through a Request for Proposal (RFP) or as an exercise. The customer knows that your team makes a certain product, and the customer desires to have a similar product. However, the original product is either too big or too small for the desired application. What generally happens?

A small team of engineers, along with a support team of management, financial, and business experts, convenes to define a solution that meets the customer’s desires. Since a similar product already exists, that product becomes a starting point for engineering, cost, and schedule studies. Usually, the preferred outcome is a product like the existing one but with more – more range, more seats, or more payload capacity. Occasionally the preference is for less – less range, less payload, or more likely, smaller external dimensions. The first course of action the team comes to is to take the current product and scale it to fit the new product’s specifications.

The problem then becomes how to do the scaling in a credible manner. I first realized this phenomenon when I was 6 years old, sitting in the rear seat of a four-passenger Piper Comanche. We had stopped overnight in Little Rock, Arkansas, and were sitting on the ramp with the engine idling when a North American P51D Mustang went by on a taxiway. I stared at the Mustang, my mind boggled by its sheer size. Up until that time, I had seen pictures of the legendary World War II fighter, and even had a model of one. But in my six-year old mind, I had made a basic scaling error – I took what I knew, the size of a four place single engine aircraft, and had scaled down that size for my internal picture of how big a Mustang ought to be, for it only had one seat, not four. And so, looking out the window from my vantage of a four place aircraft, and watching this behemoth roll by, caused a definite case of cognitive dissonance.

I had let one parameter guide my understanding of how big a Mustang is. A more thorough investigation would have uncovered some more pertinent parameters, such as engine horsepower (Mustang: 1490, Comanche: 250, or about 6 times the power), cruise speed (435 mph vs 180), and max gross weight (12,100 pounds vs 2900). Then I might have realized my mistake and understood that the Mustang was 50% longer and twice as tall as the Comanche, even with a similar wingspan.

Therein lies the fallacy of scaling – the scaling parameters must be categorized and prioritized, and for that you need knowledgeable experts. These are people who understand the interactions of different parameters, which ones to deprecate, and the ones that should dominate. And most importantly, what parameters really matter. If you are taking a four place aircraft and turning it into a six-place aircraft, there are lots of changes besides adding two seats. Most likely the fuselage length grows, and this upsets the balance of where the center of lift is for multiple reasons. Not only are you adding aluminum (or additional composites), but cable lengths (both electrical and mechanical) change. The outer mold line of the fuselage necessarily changes, the question becomes whether a “plug” is installed or the whole fuselage changes. These decisions have aerodynamic consequences. Think of the difference between the Beechcraft Debonair straight-tail Bonanza (four seats) and Bonanza 36 series (six seats) vs the Grumman American AA1 (two seats) and AA5 series aircraft (four seats). Both initial aircraft added two seats. The Bonanza took the route of blending the fuselage across the new length whereas the AA1 vs AA5 has a constant-width plug. Consequently, the AA5 has control problems in certain flight regimes, where the slab sides result in aerodynamic blanking of one or more tail surfaces. The Beechcraft solution was undoubtedly more expensive, but the 36 series of Bonanzas has endured in the marketplace whereas the AA series is a footnote.

So, what can you as a mass properties engineer do when faced with this very familiar scenario? We are in an irreplaceable position on any program because mass properties engineers have visibility across the breadth of a program. Use that to your advantage. Put on your systems engineering hat and look at how the various parts of your total system come together and how they interact. This is where mass properties engineers shine. We are among the few who have insight into every aspect of the product from where components are placed to how these components operate. And, because mass properties engineers have this insight, we are able to influence design and design changes, including functional and aesthetic aspects of a proposed design. Unlike most other engineering disciplines, we are not “pigeon-holed” into affecting one of a design’s parameters. We can interplay multiple factors and guide the program’s management towards arriving at a better solution than one by multiple engineers, each looking only at a subset of the available options. This is the true Unique Selling Point of Mass Properties Engineering, one that has immense value to a company employing mass properties engineers and it is one of the major reasons engineers choose to stay in mass properties.

Finally, what is the SAWE’s role in enabling an individual mass properties engineer to perform this powerful position? Look no further than the SAWE’s Mission Statement: The Society of Allied Weight Engineers is an international, professional, nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion, practice, and innovation of the field of mass properties engineering. The SAWE executes its mission via a variety of initiatives encompassing peer reviewed papers, conferences, industry leading training, mentoring by experienced mass properties engineers, and establishing industry specific Standards and Practices. The SAWE has enabled countless mass properties engineers to better serve their companies through all the above methods of knowledge transfer, in the process creating the next generation of mass properties experts. Tying this all together, the engineers who become tomorrow’s experts will lead the innovations that power tomorrow’s products.

I regret to inform our membership that due to the pandemic your SAWE Board of Directors has decided to cancel this year’s in-person conference in Cocoa Beach, Florida. With the rise in COVID cases and the increasing travel restrictions for our attendees, our financial outlook for the conference made it unwise to proceed. While we were all looking forward to seeing each other again face to face, the current circumstances required us to make this difficult decision.

I would like to thank the Florida Space Coast Chapter for all the hard work they put into hosting this conference for us. As many of you know, this is no small task, and they had everything prepared and ready to go. I also appreciate the work of our Executive Committee who supported all aspects of the preparation. I personally have learned a lot from this experience, and we will hopefully be able to apply these lessons to the next in-person conference in Savannah, GA in May, 2022.

While I am disappointed that we will not be meeting in beautiful Cocoa Beach this year, our team is quickly assessing our options for holding another virtual conference. More details to come.

Thanks for your support of SAWE, and I look forward to meeting with you all in the near future, either virtually or in-person in Savannah.

Sincerely,

Damian Yañez
International President
Society of Allied Weight Engineers, Inc.
damian.yanez@sawe.org

The second Boeing Orbital Flight Test of The Commercial Starliner Capsule is scheduled to launch and dock with the International Space Station (ISS) in the near future. The Society of Allied Weight Engineers (SAWE) long time Corporate Partner Space Electronics (now Raptor Scientific) helped to make it possible, https://raptor-scientific.com/products/weight-and-cg-of-large-objects-and-spacecraft/. The Starliner Crew Module (CM) during a Weight and Center of Gravity test is shown at https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasakennedy/50884857527/in/photostream/lightbox/. All events are historic. Grab a piece of Space history first-hand, https://www.nasa.gov/feature/what-you-need-to-know-about-nasa-s-boeing-orbital-flight-test-2. To the International Space Station and Beyond, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html!

Frank Fong Memorial Scholarship Winner: Grace Ruoff

SAWE Scholarship Winners:

• Madelaine Tedrick
• Jonathan Notarangelo
• Serena Yañez

For more information on these amazing students, go to: https://www.sawe.org/students/scholarships/

Please join Jeff Cerro and Richard Manning for the second quarterly 2021 Standards and Practices Missiles & Space committee for a Zoom meeting on Friday, June 04th starting at 8 am Pacific, 11 am Eastern, 1700 Central European time. We expect the meeting to last an hour. The agenda highlights of the meeting are:

• Setting the agenda for Missiles & Space for the SAWE International Conference in October
• Updating the committee on the progress on the Missiles & Space Recommended Practices (RPs)
  • RP-A6, Coordinate Systems: Moving on to the Committee Draft.
  • RP A-16, Mass Properties Measurement: Figures redone, what’s next?
• Presenting a special topic:  H2 for Sustainability — What does it mean to the M&S Mass Properties Engineering (MPE) community?

Registration in advance is required for this meeting:

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Please note that to join the meeting, you MUST use the Zoom desktop client or mobile app. You will not be able to join using the web client.

All are welcome to join the Standards and Practices Committee Military Aircraft Industry Subcommittee for a Zoom meeting on May 18th from 10:00 – 12:00 PM US Eastern Daylight Time. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss:

• Preparations for the SAWE International Conference in October
• Solicit presentations and volunteers to develop presentations for the Military Aircraft session at the International Conference
• Short Topic – Recent Experience in Out-of-Tolerance Weighing Results of US Navy Aircraft

Registration in advance is required for this meeting:

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Please note that to join the meeting, you MUST use the Zoom desktop client or mobile app. You will not be able to join using the web client.

A proposal to revise SAWE Recommended Practice TO-2 “Procedure for Developing and Maintaining Documents” is now available for comment at the Standards and Practices Public Review site here: https://www.sawe.org/standards/public-review/

The draft review period ends on 18 April 2021.

The Missiles and Space committee of Standards and Practices held its first meeting outside of the international conference of any recent memory. This meeting was open to all SAWE members with an interest in Missile and Space committee activities and despite the rather short notice, we were happy to end up with a very well attended session, including European attendees. There was primarily discussion of the Recommended Practices (RPs) that Missiles and Space controls: RP A-6, Coordinate Systems; RP 9 and RP 10 Weight and Balance Control and Forms for Guided Missiles; and RP-16, Mass Properties Measurement. But the main takeaway was that if you have questions, comments, inputs about any Recommended Practices or anything Standards & Practices is responsible for, an email to standards@sawe.org will get your concern forwarded to the right person.

More informative meeting minutes and charts can be found at GroupOffice in the folder projects2/Standards and Practices/IC – Missiles & Space/Other Meetings. The next quarterly Missiles and Space meeting is planned for Friday, May 21st.

Thanks again to all that attended

The SAWE is continuing its series of virtual, Zoom-based Mass Properties Forums with the fourth installment, “Preliminary Design Mass Properties Estimation”. This Forum topic was the most requested topic in a survey of SAWE membership and prior Forum attendees.

A panel of industry Subject Matter Experts will start the discussions by expounding on how they would approach deriving the initial mass properties upon presentation of an RFP, ultimately resulting in delivery of preliminary mass properties to their proposal customer. These mass properties would include Not-To-Exceed mass, a preliminary analysis of Center of Gravity bounds, and if applicable, initial estimation of Moments and Products of Inertia. Following these introductory remarks by the panel, the Forum will proceed to questions, comments, and further examples from the audience.

The Forum will be conducted on Friday March 26th, 2021, commencing at 9:00 AM MDT (11:00 AM EDT, 16:00 CET) and will run for 90 minutes.

Registration for this Forum will open on Monday, March 15th.

Weight Control of offshore installations is critical to ensure that any Assembly, Module or Topsides may be installed using the proposed method, with minimum hook-up, and that the overall design caters for the most severe operating criteria identified.  RP O-3 establishes the requirements for weighing Assemblies, Modules or a complete Topsides facility.  It presents methods for preparation before a weighing and reporting results after a weighing has been completed and establishes methods employed to determine the center of gravity from a weighing process.

I’d like to thank the Offshore committee for the hard work in getting this document ready for publishing.  A special thanks goes out to Dave Bennett for providing his leadership for this document with respect to being a major author and editor during the development process