Eight Features, and the Question Each One Answers

Read the Question, Then Decide if You Need the Feature

Each row states the operational question first. If the answer is no, the feature is cost without benefit — which is the whole reason this is a subset exercise and not a checklist.

A military base estimated it could save two to three days of labour per aircraft — because technicians had no easy access to one portion of the vertical tail.

That is the only hard number in the article, and it is worth more than the other seven features' descriptions combined. It is also the clearest case for equipment-specific compatibility: the stand existed, the crews were trained, and the loss was purely geometric.

Two Features Are Never Optional. Six Depend on the Work.

Safety and load capacity are properties of any stand that carries people; the rest are decided by how the work recurs. Specifying all eight on a stand that only needs three is the most common way to overpay.

From Feature to Specification

Three of these routes turn a feature into a specification; the fourth is the selection sequence that stops one answer undoing another.