Bombardier aircraft lightning testing - Canadian border incident

Local-employment externality. Pittsfield MA lightning lab's technicians were barred at the Canadian border; engineers had to perform technician work in-country.

That's true in Canada, right next to us. I had an opportunity to go do some studies at a lab in western Pennsylvania that does lightning tests. I'd actually scheduled a time, and when I got there, there were nothing but technicians. That was because the engineers and some technicians were supposed to go to Canada to do some tests for Bombardier on the aircraft up there. When they got to the Canadian border, the Canadians looked at it and said: well, we'll let these engineers in because they have specialized skills to do these tests over the next three weeks in Canada, but we're not going to let your technicians in. We have technicians in Canada — they'll do all the technical work. So they had to send all their engineers to Canada to do technician work, because just because they had technicians in Canada didn't mean those technicians could do what these guys needed to do. But I got to go, and I got nothing but technicians in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which turned out to be good because they told me all kinds of stories. That's another story.