Buying a fighter jet is the cheap part.
Mike sits down with Jim Becker, President and CEO of Perfect Point EDM, to talk about the biggest line in any defense program: keeping the fleet flying.
Perfect Point builds the E-Drill, which uses electro discharge machining (EDM) to pull aircraft fasteners. Founded in 2005, it turned a lab curiosity into a fielded tool that removes a rivet in about 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes, with no debris and almost no rework.
Jim's take is blunt. The aircraft modernized, the maintenance tooling did not, and the industry keeps papering over it by leaning on a shrinking pool of skilled mechanics.
Topics include:
Operations and maintenance as the biggest cost in a program
Electro discharge machining applied to fastener removal
Cutting a 10 minute rivet job down to 30 seconds
Eliminating foreign object debris and rework on titanium airframes
Why maintenance tooling never modernized
Winning over risk-averse engineers with the material science case
The shrinking pool of skilled aircraft mechanics
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Chapters
00:00
00:28 intro
02:06 the MRO space
02:53 the founding story
04:38 from the Marine Corps to Boeing
06:10 framing the rivet problem
07:01 tooling stuck in the 60s
07:43 titanium and steel fasteners
08:54 no FOD, no mess
09:46 the three step process
10:27 four to five times faster
10:49 killing the rework
11:52 problems everybody just accepts
13:49 the miracle-worker culture
14:55 the aging workforce
16:49 winning over the engineers
17:32 the launch that fell flat
20:21 SBIRs and the valley of death
21:39 fall in love with the problem
22:09 conventional wisdom that's wrong
24:47 making do with less
26:03 go talk to the mechanics
28:29 the stance he'll defend
30:12 where to learn more
31:03 outro
