Missile and Munitions Editing and Proofreading Services

A test round fails to reach its target and the investigation report concludes, within a week, that the guidance software had a known limitation under the specific wind conditions present that day. What the report does not establish, because nobody actually checked, is whether the round tested was built correctly to the specification that supposedly has this limitation, or whether a manufacturing defect in that specific unit is being explained away by a much more convenient and much less expensive design theory that happened to be sitting on the shelf already.

We edit what test engineers and safety boards produce following munitions and missile test failures — test failure investigation reports, hazard classification and safety case documentation, malfunction and dud reports, technical data package and specification correspondence, range safety documentation, and the corrective action plans that follow a confirmed design or manufacturing finding. Our editors work on the report that decides whether a fleet gets grounded, a supplier gets a corrective action demand, or nothing happens at all.

Distinguishing a test escape from a design defect is what a failure investigation is actually for, and its failure is a conclusion reached before the two have been separated. A single test article failing does not by itself tell you which one occurred. We work through these so the specific test article is checked against its own build records and inspection data before any conclusion is drawn about the design, since a manufacturing defect in one unit and a limitation shared by every unit of that design produce the identical outcome on the day but require completely different corrective actions; so the report states explicitly whether other units from the same production lot have been checked, tested, or are still in service unexamined, given that a finding confined to "this test article" with no statement about the rest of the lot leaves an open question a reader might not notice is open; so a design explanation is supported with evidence that the failure mode has been reproduced or is otherwise independently confirmed, rather than accepted because it is consistent with the observed failure, because many different causes are consistent with the same observed failure; so the investigation states what was ruled out and how, not only what was concluded, as a conclusion with no visible elimination of alternatives cannot be checked by anyone reviewing it later; so hazard classification implications are stated specifically rather than deferred, given that a finding with unstated safety implications gets treated as informational rather than urgent; and so the corrective action is matched to which failure mode was actually confirmed, since a design fix applied to a manufacturing defect, or vice versa, fixes nothing and looks, on paper, like the problem has been addressed. Reports written this way catch the actual problem instead of the convenient explanation.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including test data, technical findings and safety information. We are editors rather than test engineers, safety board members or ordnance specialists, and we offer no view on causation, safety or corrective action. What we can do is make sure the report shows its own working.