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    The holidays are over, Valentine's Day is done, and I am licking my financial wounds. Every year is the same: I plan a reasonable budget, albeit in my head, yet I overspend. This year was looking good until the new golf club models were released... so it goes. Now I'm staring at the calendar at the plans I have made and I'm beginning to wonder where the money is going to come from.

    Perhaps I will have a bake sale to raise money, but instead of using high quality, expensive ingredients, I will ad lib a bit. Instead of buying flour, milk, and eggs, I will use sawdust and wood glue from my garage. And I will top them off with the thumbtacks I have lying around. I will sell them cheaply and write "Mmmm! Cookies!" on the packaging so my customers will perceive it's the product they intend to buy. Once I collect, I hope that no one will notice that no matter how many times they dip my tacky sawdust cookies in milk, they aren't any easier to swallow. I will be back on top of my financial dilemma in no time... unless someone holds my feet to the fire.

    Sightline ran into a situation like this at a major commercial airport early this year. Upon our investigation we found paint failures all over the airfield and began to quiz the maintenance staff to gain insight into the issue. As it turns out, the airport bought the specified 1952-D traffic paint from a low-bidding manufacturer. Luckily we had our friendly neighborhood chemist with us to deduce the paint was essentially missing the proper quantities of the expensive components. Proper levels of titanium dioxide and quality resin are imperative in making 1952-D correctly. What this airport is receiving is a cheap milky mess - my cookies don't taste good dipped in it either, incidentally.

    I am not suggesting that the manufacturer intended to deliver such a poor product, however it would not have met the 1952-D specification. So how can the industry avoid these situations in the future? It is not feasible to test each batch of material before use, because the cost of testing often exceeds the cost of the material itself. A potential solution is to define a qualified products list for airports coupled with material testing to be issued randomly to manufacturers. Sightline is currently exploring opportunities to define such a plan. Perhaps we can all avoid another batch of tacky sawdust cookies in the future.

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