Conflicts of Interest
Conflicts of interest are an inherent problem in any industry. In the case of the shuttle disaster, the biggest conflicts of interest occurred between the engineers and the management at both Morton-Thiakol and NASA. Engineers like Boisjoly are strictly concerned with the technical issues, so it is relatively easy for an engineer to point to a problem and ask that something be done about it. In the documentary, Boisjoly unabashedly describes himself as a “pain in the ass”, and a stickler for engineering, making him an effective member of the staff for isolating an issue with no regard to political matters. (Challenger) Management, however, must concern themselves with contracts, cash flow, public relations, and client
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Renowned physicist Richard Feynman, who was a member of the Rogers Commission, concluded that “Engineers and managers are not communicating effectively”. (Challenger) Indeed, this occurred throughout the year that Boisjoly spent trying to warn management about the O-rings, and occurred again during the conference call where very likely engineers were not vocal enough in their reservations concerning the defective O-ring design. Although the documentary seems to portray Boisjoly as a lone crusader who is ignored by everyone around him, Jud Luvgood, the head engineer of NASA’s rocket propulsion program, had a different perspective on the incident. He says: “When you’re in a meeting like that, and the question is posed if anybody disagrees with the decision to launch and nobody disagrees, then that means that everybody agrees.” He adds, “I don’t care what they say today, and what they’ve been saying the last 20 years, they agreed to launch”. (Challenger) Indeed, there was likely a failure to communicate between NASA and Morton-Thiakol that led to the disaster. Of course, there is plenty of blame to go all around regarding the accident as a whole. Regarding specifically the decision to launch, Morton-Thiakol made a big mistake by trying to stop the launch literally just twelve hours before its scheduled time. Any concerns should have been brought up sooner, which would have allowed more
Two tragic incidents, the Challenger Space Shuttle crash of 1986, and the Three Mile Island near meltdown of 1979, have greatly devastated our nation. Both these disasters involved failures of communication among ordinary professional people, working in largely bureaucratic companies. Two memos called the “Smoking Gun Memos,” authored by R. M. Boisjoly, of Morton Thiokol, and D. F. Hallman, of Babcook and Wilcox, will always be associated these two incidents. Unfortunately, neither of these memos were successful in preventing the accidents of the Challenger and the Three Mile Island near meltdown.
Terrorism – This is a word that many people are terrified of. When a terrorist attack occurs, people’s daily routines are shattered. Things change instantaneously the moment the bomb goes of. When we think about a terrorist attack that really impacted the world, we immediately think about 9/11. On that day many people were hurt directly and indirectly. People were disorientated and scared. The moment there is change, the world panics. Unfortunately, 9/11 was not the only day where people panicked. On 1988, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 occurred. This terrorist attack was not as massive as 9/11; but, it did leave scares especially to the Syracuse University community.
The Colgan Air Flight 3407 was a very interesting case to look at. On February 12, 2009, at 10:17 pm, flight 3407 crashed at a house in New York after the pilots experience a stall. Flight 3407 was scheduled to fly from Newark, New Jersey to Buffalo, New York. The NTSB reported the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) revealed some discrepancies both pilots were experience. The first officer did not have any experience with icing condition but icing was one of the reasons the plane went into a stall. On the other hand, the captain had some experience flying in icing condition. The captain was experiencing fatigue, which indeed, made him unfit to recover from a stall. With that in mind, the Human Factor Analysis Classification System (HFACS) will give insight of some errors both pilots made.
Even though there were many factors contributing to the Challenger disaster, the most important issue was the lack of an effective risk management plan. The factors leading to the Challenger disaster are:
Strong internal rivalry between the after-merged Boeing and McDonnell Douglas Corp is also contributing to company’s ethical scandals. As competition between each party gets stiffer, employees might tend to resort to ethical breaches to gain competitive advantages so as to outshine each other.
The Challenger disaster of 1986 was a shock felt around the country. During liftoff, the shuttle exploded, creating a fireball in the sky. The seven astronauts on board were killed and the shuttle was obliterated. Immediately after the catastrophe, blame was spread to various people who were in charge of creating the shuttle and the parts of the shuttle itself. The Presidential Commission was decisive in blaming the disaster on a faulty O-ring, used to connect the pieces of the craft. On the other hand, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, in The Golem at Large, believe that blame cannot be isolated to any person or reason of failure. The authors prove that there are too many factors to decide concretely as to why the Challenger exploded. Collins and Pinch do believe that it was the organizational culture of NASA and Morton Thiokol that allowed the disaster. While NASA and Thiokol were deciding whether to launch, there was not a concrete reason to postpone the mission.
This report is on the Crossair flight 3597 crash which happens at Zurich airport on 24th November 2001. Analysis of Crossair flight 3597 will be covered, which includes details such as facts of Crossair flight 3597 crash, and the three contributing factors involved in the air accident. The three contributing factors are mainly Crossair, pilot error and communications with air traffic controllers.
In the shore of Bay of Bangle, Chittagong business of breaking abandoned ship has been running for more than decades and this business is increasing day by day. It is a business of dismantling old, damaged and obsolete sea going on ship, cargo and oil tankers to meet the increasing demand of raw materials for re-rolling mills and other purposes.
Fifteen years have passed since American Airlines flight 1420 experienced a botched landing tragically killing 10 passengers, the captain, and injuring 110 others. Thankfully, 24 passengers were uninjured, and the first officer survived. This horrific accident could have turned out much worse, but it could have also been easily avoided.
Many people imagine that if they were put in a survival situation that they would know exactly what to do and survive. The film Surviving The Andes Plane Crash is a documentary about how the members of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 survived a horrific plane crash on October 13, 1972. The flight was supposed to go from Uruguay to Chile but when the plane struck a mountain, the survivors of the crash were forced to survive 60 days in the middle of the Andes mountains. Survivors ate their friend’s corpses to survive, making the story famous, but two of the survivors eventually hiked for ten days, found help and rescued the rest of the group at the crash site. find Important factors of leadership applied by the crash
Culture at NASA was converted over time to a culture that combines bureaucratic, cost efficiency and schedule efficiency of the flights. This culture of production reinforced the decisions to continue flights rather than delay while a thorough hazard analysis was conducted. Managers were so focused on reaching their schedule targets that the foam insulation problem did not induce them to shift their attention to safety. It appears that at NASA managers overrule engineers when the organization was under budget and time pressure. In my opinion, high-level managers should avoid making important decisions based on beliefs and instead rely on specialist’s opinion.
not on the outside. All I wanted to do was find someone, get a story,
The space shuttle Explorer floats 370 miles above earth surface. Matt Kowalski floats above earth strapped into a propulsion pack, which makes him be able to move around in space without floating away. He radios his complements down to Houston who surveys the area which they are working in down on earth, Kowalski continues to hear about the story of his trip to Tijuana from when his wife left him while he was on his first spacewalk. Houston reminds him that most of the workers down on Earth have heard the story, before congratulating Matt on his upcoming retirement because this would be his last spacewalk. As he zips around in the propulsion pack, Kowalski revaluate himself and takes in the beautiful view of the sun rise.
Boeing is an international company with operations in various countries.. The company was founded in 1916, by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997 (The Economist, 2000). Boeing is the biggest company in the world that deals with the manufacture of military and commercial jetliners. It also deals with the manufacture of defense systems, rotorcraft, advanced communication and information systems, satellites and missiles. It is also the main contractor of international air space (Boeing, 2014). According to Smith (2014), Boeing also provides many commercial and, military airline, support services. The company also provides support services and products to customers in 150 countries. It is the largest sales exporters in the U.S. The headquarters of Boeing are in Chicago. More than 170,000 people have been employed across the U.S and in 70 countries. More than 140,000 employees have college degrees, and nearly 35,000 of them have advanced degrees in every technical and business field from more than 2700 universities and colleges worldwide (Boeing, 2014). The company has been a leading example in ensuring sustainable development.
The main causes of the Chernobyl disaster can be categorized into two sections, which are design flaws and also staff operation errors. In fact, the design flaws existed due to the application of Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalniy (RMBK) reactor. In general, the reactor core of RMBK is unstable when the energy production is lower than a quarter of maximum power (around 700 MW). In other words, the process control of the reactor is very hard to perform and therefore it has high possibility to have runaway reaction during its operation. The runaway reaction can be very dangerous as it is able to exaggerate rapidly within short period of time. Supposing, any design of reactor core should be able to squelch the runaway reaction automatically. However, RBMK does not have this feature. Regardless the lack of safety features from the reactor