Insurance hassles fixing aircraft simulators

[Steve]

I've gained somewhat of a reputation for being able to fix circuit
boards that others have tried and failed. No magic, just good technique,
and occasional good advice from some very smart guys on this group.

The military contractors who maintain aircraft simulators require that I
carry $1M in various liability insurance. Recently, my insurer, Zurich,
CANCELED me, giving only a cryptic explanation that they decided not to
insure the area that I worked in any longer. The notification came
between projects, so I just let it die.

Then, today, I got a call for yet another project, so I started shopping
for insurance again. What a drag One insurer explained that there
had been a BIG lawsuit involving simulator programming, and that he was
absolutely SURE that no one would ever insure anyone working on
simulator software. However, I work on HARDWARE. He explained that once
so badly burned, that the underwriters have probably just decided to
avoid anything to do with simulators.

I got various estimates ranging from $2,500 to $5,000 per year, if I
could indeed find anyone at all who would carry the insurance.

I can really understand this. To illustrate, two incidents that I had
some personal contact with during the past year:

1. A helicopter simulator that failed to account for the changing
flight characteristics at higher altitude was used to train military
pilots, one of whom exceeded a real helicopter's performance envelope,
causing a fatal crash.

2. I was personally accused to doing something that degraded the images
displayed on a military aircraft simulator. Fortunately, I had already
chased the problem down to a design error that must have degraded images
since it was first installed. A big meeting was called and former
personnel were called in, who all verified that indeed I was right, that
the problems had been there since the initial installation. Had my
defense not been so air tight, I could have easily been held responsible
for a significant loss in value of a $10M military aircraft simulator.

In short, if I were an insurance underwriter, I sure wouldn't insure my
line of work. The risks are just way out of proportion to the premiums.

OK, I know there are some old simulator hacks hiding in these ranks. Do
any of you know more about what is happening here than I do? Have you
found some way past these problems?

Thanks in advance for any help and/or suggestions.

Steve Richfield, N7VCG

 

[Peter de Vroomen]

Tell them to get stuffed, do the work themselves if they think they are
better at it and pursue a less risky project. Then if they can't find
anybody who is as competent as you are, and they are getting behind budget,
offer your services again. But this time you have a much better position at
the negotiation table. Make them write in the contract that you are not
liable for any damages, and that they have to provide one or more testers
who have the job of double-checking everything you produce.

In other words, you might consider learning how to become a better
negotiator. If nobody will provide insurance, then there's nothing else you
can do except of course turning down the job.

Maybe the military has it's own insurance company, lots of big corporations
have. Fight them with their own weapons .

To me, this whole liablity insurance stuff seems laughable. It's the
military that wants something, let the military carry the load of the risk.
If they don't trust your work, let them install secondary mechanisms to
insure the quality of the systems. If quality is such an issue for them,
they should provide a budget to insure it.

Do they seriously think your work is going to be better if they put more
pressure on you?

And by the way, don't they have quality standards, i.e. don't they test and
certify your work before they accept it and use it in practice?

But I'm Dutch, we see things a little different :+). Co-operation means that
EVERY party carries as much responsibility. No blame-games. Step over the
blame-games and fix the problem. Lawsuits only take more time and cost more
problems than they solve. And you have to give money to those parasites
called lawyers too, repairing the error is most likely cheaper than hiring a
lawyer.

PeterV

 

[Lawrence]

I don't have any suggestions for the insurance hassles. I am a simulator
tech myself. I tend to agree with Peter about the testing and certifying the
work before it gets used in-system. When we receive new and/or repaired
items we have a full pre-installation check we perform. All these checks are
done in accordance with the acceptance test procedures laid out when the
simulator was accepted. If the cct board or other item doesn't meet up with
the tests then we keep troubleshooting the board or, if the board was
received from another source, we ship the board back to the source. This
applies to all our items whether they be circuit boards, visual projector
tubes, flight instruments, hydraulic parts, and so on.
Are you a repair depot for the companies or are you an independant
sub-contractor who only gets called when required? I would get some sort of
form done up specifying that all items you handle are subject to a full
inspection before they are accepted just like what Peter said.
Best of luck,
Lawrence

 

[Steve]

Lawrence and Peter,

I am an independent contractor, as I must often get my hands onto the
simulator to fix the boards. By the time a board gets to me, there are
never any sort of test jigs or procedures. Of course I Huntron the
external connections, just in case their own techs missed something
doing this, power the board up and look for hot chips, etc., etc., but
more often than not I end up using the simulator itself as my test jig.
Sometimes I make a custom extender. Sometimes I use a specially
terminated ribbon cable and scope that I tack solder onto key points to
see what is alive and what isn't.

However, once a simulator is a few years old, ALL of its remaining
problems are residual design errors. Parts no longer just die - they are
all killed by something. You use the problems that you can find to point
the way to the design errors that cause other things to fail, to narrow
the debugging on other boards, etc.

Then, when you DO find the residual design errors, they are often NOT in
the boards that you are given to repair. In the example I gave where I
was briefly blamed for poor image quality, it came from their trying to
cram 25 bit-parallel megapixels per second through 70 feet of
CAT-nothing twisted pair cable from the Image Generator. I too was a
little surprised that this worked at all. As of this writing, they have
two dysfunctional spares sitting on the shelf whose only problem is that
they can't quite interpret these horrific signals. Given a scope, I
couldn't either!

Working up the food chain, the military contractor's contract with the
USAF is an "R&R" contract that makes no provision for correcting
residual design errors. On the contrary, it specifies that there will be
NO changes in configuration. To protect their butts, they even have me
agree to make no change in "configuration", even though often the system
is completely unable to work as per the drawings.

Like the mating of elephants, this is all done at high levels. The USAF
is stuck in the vacuum tube paradigm of replacing bad parts as they die
of old age, and given the choice of performing as agreed or making the
systems work, the military contractor has decided to perform as agreed,
and hires others like myself to either break the rules at their own
risk, or fail. Obviously, this is a high apparent risk proposition,
though I suspect that as soon as they tried co collect from a
subcontractor like me, that their repair resources would quickly dry up,
so I suspect that I am pretty safe.

In this complex environment, I see little to no hope of real reason
prevailing anytime soon.

Underlying all of this is the phenomenon that every year, the life
expectancy of systems is getting shorter and shorter, so that sometime
around 2008 everything will die of old age at the same time. ASIC chips
with aluminum bonding wires, PALs and GALs with limited lifetime state
storage, sockets with lifetime ratings of 10 insertions, power supplies
that zap their loads when they die, ever poorer circuit board quality
from ever increasing density, etc., etc. This seems to be at its worst
in COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) subsystems, where the real goal is 30
day lifetime. Hence, every year it gets more and more expensive to
maintain a building full of upgraded systems, while the military expects
their contractors to stay within normal inflation. This makes budgets
tighter and tighter, shortening foresight from years to months to weeks.
Many systems are now running without spares to temporarily reduce repair
costs in the past, so that routine repairs now become urgent and the
simulators become available to use as test jigs when they aren't
working. Some of these simulators are used for military mission
rehearsals, so that downtime can indirectly cost lives.

Lawrence, I presume that you are on the civilian side of this puzzle?
What's it like there? Are you seeing anything like the picture that I
see? Perhaps I should change markets? Any thoughts?

Steve Richfield, N7VCG
======================
Lawrence wrote:

I don't have any suggestions for the insurance hassles. I am a simulator
tech myself. I tend to agree with Peter about the testing and certifying the
work before it gets used in-system. When we receive new and/or repaired
items we have a full pre-installation check we perform. All these checks are
done in accordance with the acceptance test procedures laid out when the
simulator was accepted. If the cct board or other item doesn't meet up with
the tests then we keep troubleshooting the board or, if the board was
received from another source, we ship the board back to the source. This
applies to all our items whether they be circuit boards, visual projector
tubes, flight instruments, hydraulic parts, and so on.
Are you a repair depot for the companies or are you an independant
sub-contractor who only gets called when required? I would get some sort of
form done up specifying that all items you handle are subject to a full
inspection before they are accepted just like what Peter said.
Best of luck,
Lawrence

 

[Allodoxaphobia]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004 04:25:10 GMT, Steve hath writ:
<- snippage throughout ->

The military contractors who maintain aircraft simulators require that I
carry $1M in various liability insurance. Recently, my insurer, Zurich,
CANCELED me, giving only a cryptic explanation that they decided not to
insure the area that I worked in any longer. The notification came
between projects, so I just let it die.

Then, today, I got a call for yet another project, so I started shopping
for insurance again.

OK, I know there are some old simulator hacks hiding in these ranks. Do
any of you know more about what is happening here than I do? Have you
found some way past these problems?

Put *everything* in your wife's name. Then, "fly naked".
Of course, that exposes you to a WHOLE NEW risk.

Jonesy
--
| Marvin L Jones | jonz | W3DHJ | OS/2
| Gunnison, Colorado | @ | Jonesy | linux __
| 7,703' -- 2,345m | config.com | DM68mn SK

 

[DaveC]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2004 20:25:10 -0800, Steve wrote
(in article <998c7079e49ea28d8c634a1f91c98143@news.teranews.com&gt:

I've gained somewhat of a reputation for being able to fix circuit
boards that others have tried and failed. No magic, just good technique,
and occasional good advice from some very smart guys on this group.

[snip]

Thanks in advance for any help and/or suggestions.

Steve Richfield, N7VCG

Buy the insurance. Up your rates accordingly, documenting the costs/charges
in a simple letter. Present that along with the bids. It's called "passing
along the costs", which I'm sure you're familiar with in other areas of your
business (expensive components, etc.)

Good luck,
--
DaveC
me@privacy.net
This is an invalid return address
Please reply in the news group

 

[Steve]

Jonesy,

The problem is that they REQUIRE certification of insurance before I can
start work.

Steve Richfield, N7VCG
======================
Allodoxaphobia wrote:

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004 04:25:10 GMT, Steve hath writ:
- snippage throughout -

The military contractors who maintain aircraft simulators require that I
carry $1M in various liability insurance. Recently, my insurer, Zurich,
CANCELED me, giving only a cryptic explanation that they decided not to
insure the area that I worked in any longer. The notification came
between projects, so I just let it die.

Then, today, I got a call for yet another project, so I started shopping
for insurance again.

OK, I know there are some old simulator hacks hiding in these ranks. Do
any of you know more about what is happening here than I do? Have you
found some way past these problems?


Put *everything* in your wife's name. Then, "fly naked".
Of course, that exposes you to a WHOLE NEW risk.

Jonesy

 

[Steve]

Dave,

That was my plan, provided of course that anyone will sell this
particular sort of insurance. The risks are astronomical, so it requires
some sort of brain-dead insurer - a hard thing to find.

Steve Richfield, N7VCG
======================
DaveC wrote:

On Thu, 15 Jan 2004 20:25:10 -0800, Steve wrote
(in article <998c7079e49ea28d8c634a1f91c98143@news.teranews.com&gt:


I've gained somewhat of a reputation for being able to fix circuit
boards that others have tried and failed. No magic, just good technique,
and occasional good advice from some very smart guys on this group.


[snip]


Thanks in advance for any help and/or suggestions.

Steve Richfield, N7VCG


Buy the insurance. Up your rates accordingly, documenting the costs/charges
in a simple letter. Present that along with the bids. It's called "passing
along the costs", which I'm sure you're familiar with in other areas of your
business (expensive components, etc.)

Good luck,

 

[techforce]

You'll find Most Insurance people are Non-Technical types too, and that will
be a Strike against you too....because once you mention the bad past
Experience,
they dont wanna hear any more. They just want to take the money, and not
have any worries afterwards. Thats how ALL insurance companies want to
operate no matter what they cover these days.

Sounds like too maybe the Stuff you are working on is or has been shabby
design. You may want to have clients sign an agreement you are not
responsible for failures derived from design errors. I once worked in an
Avionics Shop where we had a Helocopter Power Inverter to service designed
by a Defunct Mfr. We had the Service Manual, and it passed all tests with
flying colors on the bench as per the manual. When cust got it in field in
actual Aircraft, it failed. Not once, but in many other Aircraft. It kept
coming back for us to confirm failure, but we never could. All we could do
and be liable for was what actually was stated in the Service manual.
Unfortunately my boss didnt see it that way and thought I was at fault.
Theres just no way to win sometimes dealing with Non Technical people. They
cannot think on our level, so it must be our fault.



"Steve" <dataless@DirecWay.com> wrote in message
news:0cf655c19caa809822f02e8fc407b88b@news.teranews.com...

Dave,

That was my plan, provided of course that anyone will sell this
particular sort of insurance. The risks are astronomical, so it requires
some sort of brain-dead insurer - a hard thing to find.

Steve Richfield, N7VCG
======================
DaveC wrote:

On Thu, 15 Jan 2004 20:25:10 -0800, Steve wrote
(in article <998c7079e49ea28d8c634a1f91c98143@news.teranews.com&gt:


I've gained somewhat of a reputation for being able to fix circuit
boards that others have tried and failed. No magic, just good technique,
and occasional good advice from some very smart guys on this group.


[snip]


Thanks in advance for any help and/or suggestions.

Steve Richfield, N7VCG


Buy the insurance. Up your rates accordingly, documenting the
costs/charges
in a simple letter. Present that along with the bids. It's called
"passing
along the costs", which I'm sure you're familiar with in other areas of
your
business (expensive components, etc.)

Good luck,

 

[jakdedert]

I lost my biggest client (I'm in business staffing events) because I refused
to purchase insurance amounting to two and a half times what my other
clients required. They only amounted to around 20% of my gross, but that
was a big blow.

The way insurance works for me, is that I pay a premium based on a
percentage of the amount of wages I pay. My workers comp was only half of
what they wished, my contractors liability was adequate; but the insisted on
an additional five million umbrella policy. I that was the cost of doing
business across the board, fine...I'd just have to eat it and pass the
additional cost along. The problem was that I would have had to pass that
cost to all of my clients, because there was no way to target the coverage
to a specific client...IOW, the rate applies to the 80% of wages paid on
behalf of my clients who did not require the extra coverage as well.

This is all adding insult to injury, as my rates had already risen 25% since
9/11 despite my almost pristine claims record. In fact, we have 0.80
experience rating...almost unheard of in our field. In over 15 years of
doing some very hazardous work, we have never sent *anyone* to the hospital
overnight.

Remember shortly after 9/11 when the insurers stated publicly that the
tragedy would have no effect on their solvency? Now we know why.....

jak
"Steve" <dataless@DirecWay.com> wrote in message
news:998c7079e49ea28d8c634a1f91c98143@news.teranews.com...

I've gained somewhat of a reputation for being able to fix circuit
boards that others have tried and failed. No magic, just good technique,
and occasional good advice from some very smart guys on this group.

The military contractors who maintain aircraft simulators require that I
carry $1M in various liability insurance. Recently, my insurer, Zurich,
CANCELED me, giving only a cryptic explanation that they decided not to
insure the area that I worked in any longer. The notification came
between projects, so I just let it die.

Then, today, I got a call for yet another project, so I started shopping
for insurance again. What a drag One insurer explained that there
had been a BIG lawsuit involving simulator programming, and that he was
absolutely SURE that no one would ever insure anyone working on
simulator software. However, I work on HARDWARE. He explained that once
so badly burned, that the underwriters have probably just decided to
avoid anything to do with simulators.

I got various estimates ranging from $2,500 to $5,000 per year, if I
could indeed find anyone at all who would carry the insurance.

I can really understand this. To illustrate, two incidents that I had
some personal contact with during the past year:

1. A helicopter simulator that failed to account for the changing
flight characteristics at higher altitude was used to train military
pilots, one of whom exceeded a real helicopter's performance envelope,
causing a fatal crash.

2. I was personally accused to doing something that degraded the images
displayed on a military aircraft simulator. Fortunately, I had already
chased the problem down to a design error that must have degraded images
since it was first installed. A big meeting was called and former
personnel were called in, who all verified that indeed I was right, that
the problems had been there since the initial installation. Had my
defense not been so air tight, I could have easily been held responsible
for a significant loss in value of a $10M military aircraft simulator.

In short, if I were an insurance underwriter, I sure wouldn't insure my
line of work. The risks are just way out of proportion to the premiums.

OK, I know there are some old simulator hacks hiding in these ranks. Do
any of you know more about what is happening here than I do? Have you
found some way past these problems?

Thanks in advance for any help and/or suggestions.

Steve Richfield, N7VCG