“In any domain only a few things matter, but only the expert knows what to ignore.”
This statement caught my attention while listening to an interview with author James Clear. The podcast episode is years old at this point, but this insight is timeless.
A good engineer knows what to watch out for:
- The phenomena hiding in certain phases of flight that can make your aircraft behavior diverge wildly from your predictions.
- The interactions that arise from certain airframe features and shapes, and how they impact your overall drag.
- The need for substantial control authority to arrest your UAV’s fall when it is released from its host aircraft in midair.
But the expert knows what to ignore:
- That phase of flight with the sneaky phenomena only lasts 0.2 seconds—it’s not worth spending weeks optimizing for that blip of time.
- Those airframe features, and their interactions, are unavoidable for the payload the bird needs to carry—improve them as best you can and move on.
- If you deploy at certain alpha-beta angles your UAV will be tumbling anyways—so size your controls for cruise performance, with just enough extra authority to survive most drops.
Engineering is a game of tradeoffs, of evaluating what really matters and doing your best with the rest.
We’ve only got so much time, money, and energy for any given effort. The expert knows what matters right now, and what can wait for the next phase of the program.