Wow. This is an old story, but I’d never heard it.
5 thoughts on “This Is Your Captain Screaming”
I saw this one on TV a few years ago. Evidently, the designers of the BAC 1-11 were a bit daft and decided that it would be a good idea for the windshield to mount from the outside instead of the inside, relying on the mechanical hold of the bolts to keep the glass in place against the plane’s pressurization. Like it says in the story, a mechanic used the wrong bolts. Evidently the written maintenance procedures were a bit fuzzy too, so there was blame enough to go around.
I am sorry to hear about the heroic air steward, who had to quit flying on account of PTSD and finished his working career as a night watchman.
This incident is in a really good book from about 10-15 years ago called Inviting Disaster by James R. Chiles. He goes through a wide range of what he calls “machine frontier” accidents or near accidents, and draws common threads among them. He has the usual suspects in it – Three Mile Island, Challenger, Chernobyl – but a lot of older stuff and things I wasn’t familiar with, such as the WW2 torpedo malfunction problem, the history of dynamite, offshore drilling platforms, and a lot more. For a non-engineer, he gets an amazing amount of engineering culture right. Highly recommended; I passed it around at work and everyone who read it liked it and felt it was useful.
And I should say the author is no Luddite, nor is he advocating pulling back on any of these endeavors; but there are common themes that I dare say all of us engineers have seen and despaired over.
Thanks for the book recommendation, chthulu. Just bought the Kindle edition.
I saw this one on TV a few years ago. Evidently, the designers of the BAC 1-11 were a bit daft and decided that it would be a good idea for the windshield to mount from the outside instead of the inside, relying on the mechanical hold of the bolts to keep the glass in place against the plane’s pressurization. Like it says in the story, a mechanic used the wrong bolts. Evidently the written maintenance procedures were a bit fuzzy too, so there was blame enough to go around.
I am sorry to hear about the heroic air steward, who had to quit flying on account of PTSD and finished his working career as a night watchman.
This incident is in a really good book from about 10-15 years ago called Inviting Disaster by James R. Chiles. He goes through a wide range of what he calls “machine frontier” accidents or near accidents, and draws common threads among them. He has the usual suspects in it – Three Mile Island, Challenger, Chernobyl – but a lot of older stuff and things I wasn’t familiar with, such as the WW2 torpedo malfunction problem, the history of dynamite, offshore drilling platforms, and a lot more. For a non-engineer, he gets an amazing amount of engineering culture right. Highly recommended; I passed it around at work and everyone who read it liked it and felt it was useful.
And I should say the author is no Luddite, nor is he advocating pulling back on any of these endeavors; but there are common themes that I dare say all of us engineers have seen and despaired over.
Thanks for the book recommendation, chthulu. Just bought the Kindle edition.