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Heroic Engineer Crashes Own Vehicle To Save a Life
scottbomb sends in this feel-good story of an engineer-hero, calling it "one of the coolest stories I've read in a long time." "A manager of Boeing's F22 fighter-jet program, Innes dodged the truck, then looked back to see that the driver was slumped over the wheel. He knew a busy intersection was just ahead, and he had to act fast. Without consulting the passengers in his minivan — 'there was no time to take a vote' — Innes kicked into engineer mode. 'Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together,' Innes explained."
According to TFA, he had a heart attack two days earlier and didn't know it. This restricted his circulation to the point that he ended up passing out at the wheel. There doesn't seem to be anything he could have done, except maybe go to the hospital every day just to make sure he hadn't had a heart attack recently.
Speaking as a parent, cut the apron strings. Yeah I get it, you never stop being a parent, but really, you would jump all over an adult child for saving lives, albeit at personal risk? Would you berate them for defusing IEDs for the Army or being a firefighter too? Adults have to set their own priorities and seek their own fulfillment. If their parents can't handle it that generally leads to estrangement.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Ask a someone with a basic understanding of physics if two cars at a 5MPH relative velocity can collide safely, and they would say yes. But ask that same person what to do about a pickup doing 40MPH with a passed out driver, and they'd say "call 911". You need the problem solving instinct of an engineer to know calling 911 won't help, and then to trust your knowledge of physics well enough to let that pickup hit you. Even if someone did figure out they should stop the pickup themselves, they would likely do so by trying to run it off the road, or slam into it- again it takes an engineering state of mind to come up with an optimal solution that puts no one at harm, all within a few seconds. Now, an engineering degree isn't required, but you need to know enough to be able to think like one*.
*Of course, prior training works too. For example, police should know how to do what this engineer did- I recall reading a police officer did something similar to stop a "runaway Prius" (I'm not looking to start a debate over the cause of that problem).
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While you'd like to hope that, I doubt this would be the case.
Imagine if somebody invented a computer-driven car. It takes off and everybody is driving them. The annual death rate drops from 10k to year to 500 people per year.
The end result? The car gets banned and the company is sued out of existence for bad engineering. The 10k people who used to die each year were victims of misfortune. The 500 people who die now are victims of the company.
That is why we don't have computer-piloted cars/planes/etc. Our assignment of liability is way off. The first thing I thought of when I read this article was that this guy would going to get the book thrown at him. Sure, he did the right thing, but that isn't what counts in court. Fortunately everybody else seems to be doing the right thing as well, which is a rarity.