Hi Jerry,
I have a different "take" on what you say here, perhaps worthy of consideration.
Fred Weick was a "man with a mission", in that he genuinely believed it was possible was to make flying simpler and safer and so he made it his personal goal to be proactive in doing that. He was an engineer, not a psychologist, so he didn't give thought to whether or not the "macho" pilots of the day would prefer to continue to kill themselves at a high rate operating "conventional airplanes" or would embrace the aircraft he would create.
In later years, he did come to believe that it was a marketing disadvantage to be a "safety airplane", as opposed to a "better, simpler to operate correctly" one.
If the founders of Apple had "been realistic and sold to the market as it existed", I might not have embraced personal computing. I didn't want to learn Fortran or Cobol...I wanted an electronic tool to do word processing and data manipulation. In 1985 I bought a Mac and have never looked back. I wonder if "conventional wisdom" noticed that very recently the net worth of Apple (as determined by the "market") has surpassed Microsoft!
It is possible to "change the world" in a field. You have to do almost everything right, and nobody should think it an easy task. While it is true that nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come, sheer human inertia is a force of such incredible mass that only those good ideas backed by a well-funded and capable team with fire, vision and persistence succeed (at a "right" time in history).
Regards, WRB -- .On May 27, 2010, at 08:46, Jerry Eichenberger wrote:
While the 2 control Coupe is a marvel of simplicity and ease of flying, I never understood why ERCO bucked the market. You have to be realistic and sell to the market you have. Those who try to create a market, and then sell to it, and be successful, are few and far between. While it can be done, as in modern PC computers, conventional wisdom dictates against that business approach.
