Disasters Waiting To Happen or Just Freak Accidents?
Michael Schumacher, retired Formula 1 top ace and seven times World Champion is, together with Lewis Hamilton, one of the greatest driving legends of the 21st century.
Michael sadly remains in a coma one month after a freak accident whilst out for a playful ski holiday with his family.Just before Sochi this reminds us that even though we cherish sports there are always dangers-even at the most unlikely times and in the most unlikeliest of places.
Lewis Hamilton was himself very lucky just a few hours ago to survive uninjured a horrific high speed crash into the safety barriers-where his car was a total write-off.
One wonders whether pushing the limits of cars for speed and weight requires further safety prechecks.
Indeed the same can be said of any vehicles-including boats-catamarans,airplanes, bicycles and bobsleighs-where the competition is very intense for limited sponsorship availability.
There appears to be a constant drive to reduce vehicle weight, improve performance and cost-benefits by introducing materials whose full long-term stresses are not yet fully understood.
Here I am going to be controversial and say that while I have every confidence in the Airbus A380, I always remember the Titanic-built by Harland & Wolff in Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom. It was the greatest ship (luxury passenger liner) ever to sail the seas to that date. Indeed the boast of the day was that 'God himself could not sink her'. We all know what happened to the Titanic. What is more important is that recent research has revealed that it was probably likely that mis-sized welded metal rivets caused catastrophic structural failure when she struck an iceberg in the deadly icy waters of the North Atlantic on 15th April,1912. Cost-cutting on this over-budget enterprise meant that rivets supporting the Titanic's hull were neither uniform nor able to support the vast weight of the structure above under the wrong conditions and that her demise was an accident waiting to happen even before she set sail on her maiden voyage from Southampton,Great Britain, to New York,United States.
Today the parameters have not changed. There is a constant requirement to operate within budget and where cost overruns occur they must be balanced out somewhere-and that somewhere is often in the most unlikeliest of areas-and ones which ultimately result in catastrophic failure of materials-some of which are themselves new composites whose stresses are not fully understood as they interact under enormous pressures and unpredictable freak electromagnetic turbulence and other conditions they were never designed to operate in nor could all possibly be factored under laboratory test conditions.
We saw something similar in the Space Shuttle Challenger Program1- where funding pressure from above meant that design flaws in the 'O' rings were not reported higher up the administrative chain by NASA managers-who knew that Morton-Thiokol's design of the solid rocket booster (SRB) was potentially flawed. They knew this almost 10 years before the Challenger disaster but kept it quiet for fear of losing funds or staff or both if a complete redesign of the SRB had to be initiated from scratch-just to correct a 'minor' design flaw. We all know what that 'minor' design flaw led to. But hindsight can be a wonderful thing. It's foresight and courage which is often required but lacking for fear of peer pressure,overwork and over-stress of project team staff, pressure of time to perform tasks and turnaround, loss of employment, blacklisting as a 'troublemaker' and status,demotion, loss of bonuses, loss of contracts, sheer fatigue,misinterpretation (or confusion) of instructions or expectations in the chain of authority, loyalty to the firm. All these factors (and more) often contribute to many accidents and only reveal themselves where high level inquiries are initiated as to the reasons for the disaster.
So how come the freak accident of one man should prompt me to circumvent the entire spectrum of possibilities for disaster? While doctors, brain trauma surgeons, nurses, cardiologists,therapists and ancillary staff all bravely battle to the limits of their professional abilities and capabilities to save the life of Michael Schumacher we should never forget, on the eve of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics and the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games, that this tragic accident should alert us to constant vigilance as human factors in the most unlikeliest of ways can also intervene to connect with external preventable events which just seem too unreal to fathom but which sadly have their own momentum.
Patrick Emek
Space Shuttle Challenger Program1
In the interests of historical accuracy there is a distinction between the Apollo and Shuttle program eras -though many of the same astronauts were still working at NASA in the wilderness period between both Programs and, because the Apollo Program captivated the imagination of the world in a way no other scientific endeavor had- this distinction was never quite apparent to many (including myself, Mom and Aunt) who had grown up with the wonder and excitement of the Apollo Missions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Titanic
http://scienceillustrated.com.au/blog/culture/why-did-titanic-sink/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/motorsport/formulaone/lewishamilton/10601774/Lewis-Hamilton-suffers-high-speed-crash-on-first-day-of-Formula-One-pre-season-testing.html
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/spotlight-artificial-coma-schumacher-case-040446141.html#DCe6vLc
http://www.sochi2014.com/en
http://rio2016.com/en/the-games/paralympic/event
http://www.rio2016.org/en
Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster on 28th January 1986 at 11:38 EST (16:38 UTC) [Wikipedia]
Casualties:
Francis R. Scobee, Commander
Michael J. Smith, Pilot
Ronald McNair, Mission Specialist
Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist
Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist
Greg Jarvis, Payload Specialist
Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist
Inquiries Rogers Commission
[courtesy of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoe-p-strassfield/double-feature_b_2708522.html