[AR] Re: Columbia etc. (was Re: Valley Tech...)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2020 16:40:45 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020, Uwe Klein wrote:
...the risk was thought slight and it didn't seem worth the hassles
of trying to talk the spooks into doing short-notice imaging. These
weren't *NASA* assets, remember: it meant asking for a big favor from
some difficult people.
Isn't this the same mechanism that "overlooked" the potential fall out
from this MCAS gimmick?
don't look, don't find...
Don't forget that you never hear about all the cases where the risk in
fact *was* slight, and the decision not to bother was correct, and nothing
happened.
There is no limit to how much investigation and testing you can do to try
to rule out increasingly-unlikely problems. The decision of when to stop
is *always* an economic one, assessing when the likelihood of problems has
become too low to be worth the time and trouble and cost of going farther.
The fact that such decisions occasionally get made wrong doesn't mean you
can get a better process by pretending that you'll always decide in favor
of going farther. You'll still eventually stop, and just *when* will
still be driven by economics, but now you can't admit that.
You do *NOT* get a better safety process by building in a requirement to
lie, especially if you start lying to yourself as well as to others. Not
least, because it becomes impossible to hold rational discussions about
questions like "which risks are most important to investigate?" and "have
we reached the point of diminishing returns?". Also, if every problem is
supposed to be investigated, then when budgets and schedules get tight,
people feel pressure *not* to report problems. This is worse, not better.
Henry
Other related posts: