profession: pilot career: actor - Jet Aviation

Innovation | Decision
do each a bit better, then you are one
percent better.”
The workshops on the hill
The Decision facility is locked down at
the moment. The next Alinghi is being
built, and to maintain secrecy, visitors
are only allowed access to the small
office building. As soon as a car pulls
through the entrance to the parking lot,
two security guards question the visitor
and lead the way to the office.
Nevertheless, the grounds do not have
the sterile, locked-down look of the topsecret
buildings in espionage films. It is
a hot day, and the doors to some of
the halls are open. There is rock music
coming from one of the buildings. Four
mountain bikes stand outside the office,
and inside there are a lot of personal
decorations. Decision seems like the kind
of place where people feel at home.
One gets the feeling that the pictures of
The next Alinghi
The Alinghi in production for the 2009
America’s Cup race will be a 90-foot
multihull with a mast between 45 and
50 meters in height. Boats in the recent
America’s Cup competitions have been
about 25-meters long, but the rules
have changed, and boat builders are in
new territory. Cardis has estimated that
building this boat will take at least
50,000 man hours.
34 Outlook 02/2008
successful projects that hang on the
walls are there to bring back good memories,
not to make an impression as
evidence of past successes. The office
has the utilitarian look that boat and
airplane facilities often have – the look of
a place that is designed to serve something
people love.
Cardis has the quiet air of a man
whose work speaks for itself. It takes
some prodding to get him to talk about
what makes Decision special. “We are
not afraid to start with a white piece
of paper and think about how to do
things,” he says.
Decision has close ties to research,
especially with the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology in Lausanne. Cardis
and his team suggest research topics,
question the results and apply new technologies
as soon as they are available.
They are usually building prototypes, and
this involves new methods. “Sometimes
trying new ideas is easy, sometimes it is
very tough,” says Cardis. It is what he
has been doing for 25 years and it is
deeply embedded in the culture at
Decision.
The company has about 30 employees
now. Cardis hires mostly boat builders,
people with composite skills, carpenters
and painters. Employees are generally
people who work with their hands. The
production process is manual.
Boats leave the Decision shipyard by helicopter
The construction
The hull of the Alinghi boats is made of
carbon, aluminum and synthetic fiber
aramid. These elements are made into
a kind of sandwich, with two thin fiberreinforced
faces and a thick, light honeycomb
core. The result is rigid, strong and
incredibly light.
To build the hull, Decision first makes
a mold, into which it layers the superthin
sheets of carbon fibers embedded