On Thursday, 6 Mar 1997, W. R. Gibbons wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Mar 1997, Dave Williams wrote:
> This thread reminds me of an old movie, No Highway in the Sky, starring
> James Stewart as a "boffin" who calculates that the tail assembly will
> fall off a new airplane at x hours. This is just an interesting
> engineering problem to him, until he gets on one of the airplanes that is
> near his calculated maximum hours.
No, you do him a disservice. He was trying to convince everybody that
the "Reindeer" was unsafe and needed a re-design. The tail section he
had in his hanger under a stress test had "failed to fail" and folks told
him he was wrong. Turned out the test tail took longer to fail because
of a temperature factor. It eventually did fail, and then a report came
in that a Reindeer had the tail fall off while taxiing. He was
vindicated.
He was convinced that he should stop the take-off of a Reindeer at Gander,
Newfoundland. He was in the cockpit arguing about it, and decided to take
action. He retracted the gear and belly-flopped the plane.
It was a very good movie along the lines of the play "Enemy of the
People" (by Ibsen?). I suggest a rental, if it's available.
The Challenger disaster made me think of this movie. There were
engineers at the booster company who knew the ship should not launch.
They were overruled by management.
Phil
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