Aircrafts are the reason why Japanese car manufacturers are so successful!

Situation

• A special survey on aviation in this month's Monocle magazine has the following fragment: "Japanese car companies are entering this new field [aviation] for two main reasons: first, they already have invaluable in-house expertise because they hired thousands of brilliant engineers who could not work in the aircraft industry after the war. Most of the technological advances in the Japanese car business were due to people who used to build planes. Yutaka Kume, the president of Nissan in the 1980s came from the aircraft industry. So did Kenichi Yamamoto, who created the rotary engine for Mazda, and Shoichiro Irimajiri, who designed the first Formula One engine for Honda."

Significance

• The secret sauce behind Toyota's engineering excellence was to bring talented engineers who were used to extreme levels of mechanical complexity and had no problem translating the manufacturing rigor from one industry to another
  

Suspicion

• Couldn't American car makers snap some big brained engineers from one of the many billionaire Department of Defence contractors to get out of their crisis?