Goings On at Sequoia Aircraft

This appeared in the June 1999 issue of Falco Builders Letter.

This is a short newsletter because we got behind so badly on the March issue, and it takes a while for new items to pile up here to make up enough material for another Falco Builder Letter. So we're going to be brief this time (hey, sometimes our newsletters are quite long) and we'll try to get back on schedule with the September issue.

Things continue to be exceptionally busy here. Everything is running along at about twice the pace of last year, except for the restocking of inventory, which is much bigger. This year we're reordering about four times the normal amount of parts, and we're working hard to get the backordered parts down to essentially zero.

A new batch of fuel tanks arrive.

I continue to be astonished at what our website is doing for us, and how many people check in there. Sometimes, we will post an article on the website, and then three days later, everyone I talk to on the telephone has read it, including people in Australia, New Zealand, and all over Europe. And it's not just active Falco builders either, but people all over aviation who love to go through the Falco website and see what we're doing.

In the short term, my plans are to more aggressively use the Falco website for the delivery of information to Falco builders, and to come up with new ways of assisting builders. There is a natural tendency of inertia that affects all companies. For example, if we note a minor error on a drawing, does it make economic sense to send every single builder a new revision list? No way. But if we use the Internet to deliver the information, we can aggressively pursue improvements to the plans, kits and manuals.

In the past, we have published a price list of Falco kits, and we have included prices of other things that you might buy from other companies, glues, pitot tubes, tires, etc. We have eliminated that from our price list, and it is located in the Falco Skunkworks.

I am also reworking the Falco Kits portion of our website, and I expect they will all be located in the Falco Store when I get finished. My intention is to provide greater information about the kits, including shipping tickets, photos of the components, shipping considerations, etc.

I'm also looking for new ways to answer persistent questions that come up. Let's say a mentally challenged builder -- Pierre Wildman, for example -- is reading the manual, and it says to install P/N 877, but Pierre doesn't know what kit the part is included in. So he tears through the shipping tickets, looks in boxes, and finally just emails me, and what do I know? I'm just the owner! You need to talk to Susan, who tracks all that stuff!

So I'm planning to create a What's Where index of Falco components, so you can go to our website, look up the part number, and it will tell you what kit the part is in.

Then, moving up the intellectual ladder, let's say a mechanic is working on a Falco and wants to locate a part. With automobiles and major aircraft companies, this sort of information is typically provided on microfilm, so the mechanic flips through 'pages' of a manual, looking at exploded assembly drawings until he identifies the part visually and then gets the literate people in his office to actually write down the information, and order the parts.

That's the same sort of thing I'm thinking about creating on the Falco website. Exactly where and how we do it, I'm not sure, but I will be looking for feedback and suggestions from all of you.

We will also be including late-breaking news of parts that have just come in. After an interminable delay, we finally have airspeed indicators here, and we expect to have manifold pressure/fuel pressure gauges shortly. We will be adding these to the instrumentation kit and they will be available separately as well.

And finally, I would love to have more of you in the Falco Workshop on our website. We're all in this together, and we all benefit by an ever-enlarging Falco world, so please send in photos of your project and a bit of news about yourself. I always would like to have a photo of you with the airplane, since seeing what each of us looks like adds so much to the appeal.

Alfred Scott