-for the second time in nasa s history, a space shuttle has been lost along with its entire crew. once again, we are asking ourselves, how could this have happened? -do you have any idea how big that piece of foam was that came off? -we d heard some reports that during launch there had been some concerns that some debris hit the wing. is that true and is that any cause of concern and that could have caused today s problems? -it is true. it was judged that, erm , that event did not represent a safety concern. -this happened under my watch, but i didn t have the answers. in every public forum i m gonna have to be in, how am i gonna explain this to anybody? at this time, we have no indication that the mishap was caused by anything or anyone on the ground. -nasa never wants to look stupid. nasa wants to be the agency with the answers. -my thoughts are on what we missed, what i missed to allow this to happen. -but if you overlook something, it will come to bite you one day or anot
-the pressure on the management team to stay on schedule and the concept of, it s just foam is leading the charge through all of this. -so, it wasn t like they weren t talking about issues at all, but there certainly was a big focus on the on the schedule. -here s an e-mail, it s tuesday january 21st, this was sent six days into the columbia mission. this is a private exchange between linda ham and ron dittemore, two of the top managers in the program. the rationale for flight for the sts-112 loss of foam was lousy. the rationale states, we haven t changed anything, we haven t experienced any safety of flight damage in 112 flights.
WITH the eruption of Mount Ruang in Sulawesi kicking off on April 16 and the subsequent upending of the travel plans of many due to all the airport closures and cancelled flights, it is only natural that many have questioned the need for such measures.
Was lousy. The rationale states, we havent changed anything, we havent experienced any safety of Flight Damage in 112 flights. the Concluding Sentence the rationale was lousy then and it still is. What i take that to mean is that Linda Ham is raising a concern, but they appear to rely on the fact that previous flights which had suffered this foam loss, had returned safely. In other words, weve gotten away with this. This is a failure to learn from past similar events, simply because those flights did not have catastrophic consequences. The classic the classic normalisation of deviance. You have to make sure that every incident is thoroughly investigated and properly assessed. And that wasnt done for the 112 foam loss
flight is something quite different to the cause of those two fatal crashes and the reason for the grounding. that a piece of software used by the pilots on the flight damage of the mcas system. it was something which caused both crashes which had to be completely reworked before that aircraft was able to get back to being recertified as a safe aircraft and commercial operation. it also, of course, affected boeing as a company which lost an enormous amount of trust and confidence during that period, and they had to work hard to brick that back and rehabilitate the aircraft into service. so last week s incident quite different. we don t know what caused it yet. i think as one your reporters commented there. it s important. this is also quite a new aircraft, only about two months off the production line. we wouldn t expect something like this to happen on any well-maintained aircraft be it old or young but certainly it s particularly surprising to get