Here is an opinion piece that I wrote in 2005: It's full of both sceptism and hope for Emagair's success. I'm sorry to say that I will not be upgrading at this time. Perhaps when my mags need rebuilding I will reconsider.
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The story of P-Mags and E-Mags
When I heard about EMagair, the maker of P-MAG and E-MAGs, I thought 'what a great idea!'. I designed out my conventional mags and designed in the EMagair products with their assistance.
I placed my order and waited, but the products were delayed several times and I finally had to get my engine built so I cancelled my E/P-Mag order and switched backed to conventional mags. I'll leave all of the wiring in place for a future upgrade, so if EMagair can ever deliver and proved their reliability, I can upgrade. It will cost me more money, but it's a safe way to go.
I have been involved in dozens of new product introductions in my career, and many of them had technical problems and delays at the beginning. The company I have worked for the last 17 years (PMC-Sierra) was very proud of it's record on getting new products out on time with minimal technical problems, but sometimes we had some problem cases.
My opinion is that EMagair is having technical problems, and they want to take the time to get their products right. That's what they should do. In my discussions with them, however, I became concerned about how they are going about things. It's entirely possible that they will have a great product, but a broken business plan. I hope they are getting good business advice.
My background is engineering, marketing and business analysis (mergers and acquisitions). I have seen a lot of companies fail, even though on paper they have a killer product. It's all about the right plan, the right people, execution and documentation.
Documentation?? Yup, 90% of the businesses I analyzed failed because of poor documentation. When you have 50 people designing a 20 million gate integrated circuit, you better get the engineering documents, manufacturing and customer documents right or you will never, ever find all of the bugs, never ship the product for revenue and never have a successful business.
EMagair is a different animal, I agree... but being successful with a product like this (eventually to be certified) will swamp them in paperwork. For example, what is their qualification test plan?
Are they going to let their customers debug their products for them? I hope not. If I were them, I'd get 3 or 4 aircraft test beds in the air as soon as possible with backup magnetos, and run them through a battery of tests, collect data and analyze it before I shipped any products to customers.
Things to think about...
- will they work at temperature extremes?
- will they work with a lot of temperature cycling?
- what about high altitudes?
- what about vibration (normal and abnormal)?
- what about contamination from engine fluids or dirt?
- what about reliability in corrosive atmospheres?
- what about susceptibility to electrical interference (comm radios, transponders, etc.)?
- what happens when the internal micro goes insane?
.... and so on.
There are many questions. They have been good at answering some, but not others. Food for thought. Good luck to them. If they are successful I will upgrade.
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