You Can Make It Fool Proof

(But you can’t make it damn fool proof)

Being a Mechanical Engineer is a frustrating profession. The general public, consisting mainly of people who are not engineers, somehow think that engineers and the work we produce should be perfect, no matter how unique or complex the problem being addressed.

I have news for you, we’re not perfect, and a whole bunch of engineers working out there, in spite of their education and the possession of credentials like professional registration, are down right dangerous. Somehow enough good ones (engineers) manage to overcome the shortcomings of the bad ones.

Take aircraft, for instance. Although we have only mastered powered flight for the past one hundred years, the general public expects commercial and civilian aircraft to be models of perfection. Every time there is an accident, the survivors’ families attempt to sue the ass off of the manufacturer. The lawsuits nearly put manufacturers like Cessna and Piper out of business in the 1970’s.

I remember one instance where a guy pulled the front seat out of his Piper Cub so that he could mount a video camera in a position looking out of the windscreen. The guy also moved the rear seat forward temporarily so that he could fly the airplane and operate the camera at the same time.

He took off in the plane in front of his family, the modified seat came loose and slid backwards, the pilot yanked the stick back thereby stalling the airplane, and killed himself in the ensuing crash.

What did the wife do? Of course she sued Piper.

What did the jury do at the trial? Of course the found Piper at fault.

They ordered Piper to pay millions, even though the modified seating arrangement was not factory approved. They said Piper was to blame in not foreseeing the possibility that someone would move the seat to a position on the seat track beyond the normal range dictated by two seats.

I call BS on that verdict—but I wasn’t on the jury.

The good news is that the jury in Florida this week refused to blame Lear Jet in the 1999 crash that killed golfer Payne Stewart and five others.

“Orlando, Florida—A jury in Orange County, Fla., cleared a luxury jet manufacturer in the 1999 crash that killed pro golfer Payne Stewart and five others, according to Local 6 News.

A Learjet lost cabin pressure soon after taking off from Orlando in October 1999, killing all on board within minutes. The plane eventually ran out of fuel and crashed into a South Dakota pasture.

Stewart's family sued Learjet after the crash claiming a mechanical problem is what doomed the charter jet.”

See, it’s less than funny that so few people want to take responsibility for doing little things like maintaining the fancy doohickeys that we (engineers) design and build, and even fewer want to accept responsibility for any undesirable outcomes that result from their own negligence.

Another common reaction is to ask the government to step in and pass a law or regulation to solve some newly perceived problem. Take your car’s tire pressure, for instance.

The government is demanding that the auto manufactures install tire pressure sensors on all vehicles by the 2008 model year. The funny thing is, the manufacturers don’t like the way the rules are written and they are suing to delay the program’s implementation.

As is usual when the government gets involved in anything, the wording of the law is flawed:

“The group said the rule doesn't require the systems to operate with replacement tires, and the systems would only kick in when a motorist had been driving between 30 and 60 mph continuously for 20 minutes. That would make it difficult for someone driving in a city or under other stop-and-go situations to know if a tire had low pressure.

"With this rule, motorists may mistakenly feel safe and not believe they need to check their tires," Goodyear said in a statement.”

How bogus is that?

What I want to know is, if you are worried about wrecking due to tire pressure, rather than passing a law, why not just go out and buy a $2 tire pressure gauge and use it once in a while like I do?

You don’t have to be an engineer to think of that, do you?