CHAPTER 20

Partnering Risks Realized

Wednesday, October 19, 10:33 a.m. . . .

“What am I looking at?” Barton asked.

He stood with Paul Marochek on the metal-grated platform of a portable lift that a driver had steered onto the bare concrete floor of a production hangar. The driver had positioned the platform near the partially constructed fuselage of one of the new SMA planes, about thirty feet up from the floor. Then Marochek had pointed to a crack between the fuselage and the wing, right where the two connected. The crack widened as it extended from the front to the rear of the wing.

“That,” said Marochek, “is what a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars screwup looks like.”

“That crack. Between the body of the plane and the wing,” said Barton. ...

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