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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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RedBear on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:28PM
Argh. This is an idiotic but extremely persistent attitude that gets a large number of people all over this planet killed every year in various different professions. It's absolutely part of the engineers' job to design for Murphy's Law, and part of Murphy's Law is the possibility of operator error. I could whip off a hundred different reasons why the human operator of a machine might suddenly do something that would end up destroying the machine or harming people, from deliberate action to sudden oxygen deprivation to panic. There will always be plenty of actions and decision points left in the control of the machine for humans to do, but deliberately leaving it possible to accidentally do something that we know will destroy the machine and kill people is not something that anyone in their right mind should be advocating. If they had properly accounted for this possibility we would still have SpaceShipTwo and two _living_ test pilots, and a small log file saying "WARNING: PILOT2 ATTEMPTED TO UNLOCK TAIL FLAP DURING BRAKING STAGE2 AT FLIGHT SPEED NNNN", and that would have been the end of it.
There are probably 10,000 interlocks of various sorts from hardware to software to operator conditioning already built into a machine like that, and probably still 10,000 things the pilot could do that would have extremely bad results. But when you find something that you can do to negate the possibility of operator error that can be implemented without exorbitant cost, you don't stand around with your thumb up your butt saying, "Well, shit happens. That dumbass shoulda known better." People are dead, that isn't good enough.
I guarantee that 9 times out of 10 if an accident report conclusion is "Operator Error", there will almost always eventually be a repeat of that event, usually multiple repeats, and there will almost always be a simple, reliable way to keep that event from happening. In most cases there is _NO_ valid reason not to implement the solution, but this attitude of "whelp, pilot error, let's go home boys" all too frequently keeps us from doing anything about it. Not cost, not complexity, just this bizarre belief that we should "do more training" and continue to rely on the flawed human operator to be perfect 100% of the time. When highly experienced test operators are still able to ACCIDENTALLY destroy your machine and get themselves killed, there is something wrong with the training AND the design. Each is a backup for the other. You don't do either/or, you do both.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ