A thread of common financial focus runs though the documentaries I am about to write about. As always I have to point out that I do not have all the facts, what is said in this piece is just my thoughts on something that I came to mull after watching these and other documentaries that looked at man made endeavours ultimately failing and by doing so costing the lives of many involved. I am not accusing anyone of anything, I’m just spotting something that stands out rather clearly to my mind.
I got the impression the people involved had trusted a person or firm that had then somewhat hoodwinked them, maybe because it might have focussed on the financial success of its main endeavour more than it should have, and I wondered did anyone pay a real cost in the end other than those that had been killed, I mean was anyone actually to blame, or is risk a necessity for endeavour. Personal risk I have no problem with, risking other people because you think their lives are a risk worth taking might suck a bit though.
Documentary 1
A major aircraft company made aeroplanes, and apparently they made really good safe ones right up until their focus shifted from making good safe planes, which had had the beneficial effect of generating a large amount of capital to make better planes and pay the people concerned handsomely also, toward ensuring that the stock price was the most important aspect of everything they did for everyone involved. From that point onward I imagine the temptation to bend existing management, productive, safety, and ultimately training practices, that had previously ensured a good and safe product, was strong enough to mean that one focus was possibly sometimes in conflict with the other. The consideration of the stock price was mooted by the documentary participants to have won this battle, and in doing so they felt that the company had changed for the worse.
This is what I feel I learned when watching documentary 1. I may be wrong, I’m not a researcher and I know nothing about aircraft, but it’s the impression I was left with as the credits rolled. What the aircraft manufacturer had apparently done was to introduce a new piece of technology to one of its existing aircraft, a plane that had been modernised so as to compete with a competitors new output, yet had consciously thought of and described this new technology as something that did not fundamentally change the nature of the aircraft and the experience of flying it, so from their perspective there was no requirement for extra training for existing pilots. At no point in the documentary does anyone accuse the firm of deliberately misleading, but the participants do indicate that they are sceptical after the fact.
A training requirement would mean time and money, subsequently lowering the return for the potential customer (commercial airlines). This could make the newly reconfigured aircraft less attractive for the buyers and could have affected the share price of the firm selling it. We might be lead to think that at some point someone must have made a decision to use descriptive language, in a rather creative way, so as to re-frame the change as no change at all, or at least as a change that was insignificant to the pilot and subsequently the safety of the passengers. Our question must be now “is there culpability to be found, is someone guilty of deliberately misleading some people to the extent that it caused the unnecessary death of the persons on either of the aircraft that had crashed?”
I think I see this, and I think it was money based (though I am not an expert).
Documentary 2
In the second documentary I am learning of how a man built a submersible vehicle that was a revolutionary design concept, and began operating it without the support of the wider industry of underwater vehicle manufacture and expertise. It’s clear his goal was to be thought of in the same way as other successful rich people and to be described as a pioneer. He went on to risk the lives of people who travelled in the craft multiple times, and ultimately he lost his own life and killed the passengers he had taken to the deep because he seemed to refuse to learn from the failure data that had been gathered by his engineers.
The craft was made like no other, this should be the primary red flag of the story and a major reason why it should not have been used commercially until it had passed some sort of external objective scrutiny. The second red flag should have been that it hadn’t actually been required to pass any industry standard safety checks at all because of the way it was marketed. A clever trick of describing the persons within the submersible as “crew members” rather than “passengers”, even thought they were all paying to be there, ensured that rules could be circumnavigated and the experimental sub was not a passenger vehicle in descriptive terms. To us, the viewer, this seems like a ridiculous and crude attempt to convey spurious information that we will not, could not, accept, but for the letter of the laws governing this sort of thing it was acceptable and made the journeys then possible. Maybe the rules will change now?
All persons involved accepted the risk that they were to enter an experimental vessel to attempt a close view of the Titanic wreckage. I was left wondering if they had all been made fully aware that the sub was not widely supported by the industry, or of the descriptive trick that had been used to make their journey possible? I do not know, the documentary did not do anything other than point the trick out, and I may be wrong to call it a trick, it just looks to me like one. Wikipedia states that Rush, the owner, had made false claims of links to NASA and Boeing that they had been heavily involved in the design and testing of the vessel, but both disputed these claims after the disaster to distance themselves from such involvement. They both also stated that their design suggestions had been ignored as Rush was not interested in working within what they described as quality standards. If Rush suggested these things to the potential “crew” members, with the purpose of misleading them and tainting their decision to participate then there is a legal case yet to be made yet I suspect, despite the waiver signed.
Standards agencies exist so that the public can trust the safety of machines and practices they choose to purchase or participate in, mainly because the general public has no way of independently checking these for themselves. You trust an aircraft before you depart on it because you trust the governance of the aeronautics industry, as underpinned by laws formed by governments on behalf of citizens, though documentary 1 throws this into muddy water too. Rush got round this by using the words “experimental” and “crew”, and one cannot find it easy to accept that he was not aware of what he was intending to achieve by doing so. Each person that travelled was made aware that they may die, so at least he was honest about that.
The big problem seems to be Rush’s attitude toward learning from data, that he maybe ignored or dismissed it. The vessel had a system of monitoring fiberglass cracking based on sound, and it had recorded spikes that indicated to engineers that there was a structural weakening in the hull prior to the final dive, Rush chose to continue at this point, we might speculate that this decision could have been made because to not do so would likely set back the project and maybe force the company to rethink their entire approach. That would be very costly and possibly humiliating. Who wants to travel on a sub that may fall apart? Here we are very likely to be looking at decision to put the financial wellbeing of the investor/s above the lives of some people who have trusted them. We will never know, the guy didn’t come back up.
Documentary 3
The space industry needs funding, and government money is finite. The popularity of space endeavour is not a constant, and the support for various projects is not universally funded it requires public interest to be high so that government will release public capital towards it. In an effort to create a high public interest in space travel NASA decided to launch a shuttle with a civilian onboard, this was initially a PR success. The rocket failed and the crew were killed, which was not the outcome that NASA had been seeking, but is always a possibility in risky endeavours of course.
Danger is involved and risk is always present in rocket technology. It is not inherently safe to work with an explosive material in a contained space. In rocket form the contained incendiary material, the fuel, performs a controlled burn to act in propelling a device on a trajectory upward, if the control fails it is basically an explosive akin to a bomb. There is but one difference between a missile and a rocket, one has a payload that is intended to destroy, the other has a payload that is intended to be delivered intact. They are the same thing and they have emerged from the same development projects.
In 1986, Challenger was launched, seemingly against the advice and wishes of some of the engineers involved, this is what the documentary and the words of the participants reveals. It was too cold overnight at the launchpad to ensure that certain parts of the rocket would work optimally and within tolerances that were known, this is what the subsequent investigation revealed. Partial failure had been noticed on previous missions and formed part of the data of this mission also. Data is very important to engineering rockets or any scientific venture of this magnitude, in fact the use of data is science itself.
Yet here, once again, we are maybe bearing witness to where pressure from the awareness of the necessity to succeed, on the part of persons who need that success so that they can continue their job or keep their prominence, and derived from a known necessity to secure future capital funding, could have overridden the decision making process and shifted the window of acceptable risk to be somewhere other than it would have been naturally if there had been no financial incentive bearing down on all the project. Financial gain, or the mitigation of financial loss can shift risk, and maybe people will gamble on unknowns if someone else is the target of that risk. I wonder if the decision to launch on the part of whoever made it would have been different if they had had to be in the shuttle that was attached to the rocket rather than in the control centre or the press room?
Conclusion…
Fear those people who exhibit moral hazard, fear them in general. The people to whom your right to life and continued existence is no barrier to their social prominence or financial ambition. Call for ever greater scrutiny by independent bodies, ones that are state funded, and ensure that you support their continued funding by the state so that they are not funded by the very people they are supposed to be scrutinised by! Do not accept the results of internal investigations, do not wait for years before the government releases their findings where the guilty are those that have died while the investigation was trundling along at iceberg speed.
A weather disaster in Dallas Texas happened as I was writing this, and many are blaming the loss of life, children’s lives, on the US government, the president specifically, for cutting the funding to the NWS, an agency that might have predicted the disaster if it had not had its resources hobbled (speculation). The US government is saying though that ample warnings were sent out. Makes you think doesn’t it? The National Weather Service (US) has it’s funding cut, but military spending continues to rise… Maybe I’ll see this as the subject of yet another documentary many years from now.
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