Tell me about a time you contributed to or drove a long-term design strategy (for a family of aircraft, a new platform, or a major upgrade). How did you balance near-term program milestones with longer-term strategic goals such as commonality, maintainability, and future growth capability?

Question

VirtualInterview.AI · Accepted Answer

On our next-gen regional turboprop, I led the configuration work for the empennage and rear fuselage, but we knew from day one this was really a family-of-aircraft decision, not just a single-program choice. The program needed a PDR-ready baseline in 14 months, while the business wanted a common rear fuselage and systems architecture that could scale to a stretched -900 version and a potential freighter. I proposed a modular rear pressure bulkhead and standardized avionics/electrical bay layout. In the short term, that meant about 2% weight growth and an extra three months of design effort spread across a team of 12. We justified it with a clear roadmap: we showed that commonality would cut non‑recurring for the stretch by ~25% and reduce spares variability by about 30%. We hit the PDR date, and when the stretched variant was launched two years later, we reused roughly 80% of the rear fuselage definition with minimal requalification.

Sample Answer

Keywords