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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday July 29 2015, @10:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-dangers-of-being-a-test-pilot dept.

The National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) has found that a mix of pilot error and design flaws led to the crash of SpaceShipTwo last year:

The crash of a Virgin Galactic spaceship last fall in California's Mojave Desert was caused by pilot error and design problems, the National Transportation and Safety Board announced Tuesday after a nine-month investigation.

NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports the NTSB found that SpaceShipTwo broke apart during a test flight on Oct. 31 because the co-pilot prematurely unlocked a section of the space plane's tail used in braking. The pilot survived, but the co-pilot, Michael Alsbury, was killed.

"But investigators found that SpaceShipTwo's design was also to blame. NTSB board member Robert Sumwalt says proper safeguards to prevent such human error weren't in place," Geoff says.

Detailed summary at Wired. Richard Branson's statement [video] in response.


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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:26PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:26PM (#215531)

    > Or in summary, test pilot work, which is exactly what they were doing anyway.

    One could argue that the loss of only one of the two pilots is a success of sorts. Something really bad happened, but not all life was lost, therefore the overall design is not fundamentally flawed.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:11PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:11PM (#215552)

    Eh pretty much. I'd say a design failure scenario would be modeling and ground testing made them claim the wings fall off if you deploy flaps above 100 knots, and you deploy at 80 knots and the wings fall off anyway. Or we thought it would be stable but it goes into uncontrollable flat spin at high altitude. Pitch-roll coupling like the ancient old X-3? How about placing a giant liquid fuel tank to the side of a multi-segment solid rocket booster, like, what could possibly go wrong? Test pilots been killed by design issues like that, and its not the kind of thing you can patch around "eh just make that bracket bolt hole one size bigger and call it good". The X-3, LOL what a dog of a plane, I got to fly one in a simulator many years ago, what a POS, I guess they call it a learning experience for a reason, never design a plane like that again, I still remember it was like a flying telephone pole with a wound up rubber band for an engine and the pitch-roll coupling made it feel like I was fighting an autopilot on acid, that plane just sucked, a freakish flying gyroscope.

    This failure basically boils down to "never do that particular flight maneuver again" and train the hell out of it. Maybe a solenoid that energizes and locks the control lever in place if the airspeed is out of range unless some kind of "emergency override" button is simultaneously pressed. It should be safe to launch the next one like next month or so. Going all the way back to the drawing board could have required years or shut down the program.

    Something I miss in "modern" computer games is flight simulators that are realistic enough not to be a video game arcade port toy but unrealistic enough that the PITA issues of flying are no issue. Basically the computationally limited era of 80s sims, maybe with slightly better graphics.