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Poor Pilot Training Blamed For Virgin Galactic Crash

Posted by Soulskill on from the fix-it-and-keep-trying dept.

astroengine writes: SpaceShipTwo co-pilot Michael Alsbury was not properly trained to realize the consequences of unlocking the vehicle's hinged tail section too soon, a mistake that led to his death and the destruction of the ship during a test flight in California last year. Responsibility for the accident falls to SpaceShipTwo manufacturer Scaled Composites, a Mojave, Calif., company owned by Northrop Grumman Corp, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined at a webcast hearing on Tuesday (PDF). Poor oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees commercial spaceflights in the United States, was also a factor in the accident, the NTSB said.

4 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. If there was a criteria for safe unlocking by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If there was a criteria for safe unlocking of the hinged tail section then why wasn't it interlocked until the criteria was satisfied?

    A bigger error here is reliance on operator training. It's the least reliable form of ensuring a certain outcome.

    1. Re:If there was a criteria for safe unlocking by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I can't imagine the engineers who designed this wouldn't be aware of those consequences. In fact, I'd go so far as to call this a partial failure of the engineering department as well - specifically, the ones who created the cockpit controls. I mean, the spacecraft basically had a single lever in the cockpit which if pulled at the wrong time would result in the fiery destruction of the spacecraft and death to all aboard. That's a hell of a consequence for a single mistake in the cockpit.

      Granted, clarity in hindsight and all that, but it just seems surprising to me that this possibility wasn't given more thought, given that this was a major feature of the spacecraft. You can imagine they're probably taking a second look at other systems and trying to figure out what the potential outcomes of human error might be and ways to mitigate those errors. At least, I hope they're doing that.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    2. Re:If there was a criteria for safe unlocking by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If there was a criteria for safe unlocking of the hinged tail section then why wasn't it interlocked until the criteria was satisfied?

      A bigger error here is reliance on operator training. It's the least reliable form of ensuring a certain outcome.

      From TFA:

      Those ships will include an extra mechanical device to prevent pilots from inadvertently unlocking the tail sections, known as “the feather” early, Virgin Galactic wrote in a report obtained by Discovery News.

      Which by the way, might be able to fail itself, and keep the pilot from unlocking the tail section when it needs to be unlocked. Killing the pilot and co-pilot.Hellova world, eh?

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  2. Re:Maybe he thought that "Unlock" would only unloc by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It appears that deploying the feather was a multi-step operation. The flap covering the feather is unlocked, then the flap is opened, then the feather is deployed. The pilot probably knew that the feather could not be deployed at the speed they were going, but did not know/understand that the flap could not stay closed if unlocked at the speed they were going. Thus, the pilot unlocked the flap, and from there, whatever other latch that made step 2 work broke, the flap opened and the feather deployed on its own.

    If the unlock switch had some god-awful name describing exactly what it did

    Maybe the button will be renamed "Remove Restraints Holding Feather Flap Closed During Transonic Region".