Having been involved with failure analysis, I would agree with Markus that one piece is probably not THE root cause. In cases like this one, there is usually a chain of events and causes that haven't been thought about very much that cascade into a catastrophe. For example, the O-ring in the Challenger case is not THE root cause, it was a combination of weather, design, poor choice of materials and cutting some corners. Remember, the joint was totally re-designed after that incident and not just to change the O-ring configuration. I expect that when the Columbia failure is finally understood, it will be a similar chain of events. For example and totally hypothetically, a chain of events being foam coming off the ET, damaging one tile, which led to cracking of one carbon-carbon composite piece in the leading edge during re-entry which caused something else to disrupt the whole leading edge which led to failure of the entire wing assembly. A good example is the Turkish DC-10 crash of about two decades ago. A technician moved the safety locking pin so the baggage door could be closed more easily. That resulted in being able to close the latch handle when the actual latch was not positioned properly. There was a design problem with the closing mechanism, but if the pin had been left alone, it would have been noticed. Was the root cause the pin, the technician, the latch, of the unfortunate combination of all of the above? Best Regards, Russ Pinizzotto +--------------------------------------------------------------------------- + ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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