Originally Posted by chuks
Even the very high-profile Concorde crash led to allegations that maintenance errors caused a critical mis-alignment in the landing gear that went ignore
Have you read the report? It's still on the BEA website. It's rather long, though.
The incorrect re-assembley of the landing gear bogie is discussed in detail, examined as to its causes (not following maintenance procedures, incomplete work-shift handover, sloppy management and non-use of specialised tools, ...), recommendations are given about improving maintenance procedures, etc. But it was ultimately found not to have been a cause to the accident.
This is confirmed by my Why-Because-Analysis (after a lengthy discussion with a
professional expert, correspondence in the appendix) which I performed for my Diploma thesis (to be found at
http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de -> Publications -> Theses -> "Visualisation Concepts and Improved Software Tools for Causal System Analysis", Part II.
Direct Link to the PDF.)
There are no indications in the flight data recorders that there was any undue influence to aircraft performance from the landing gear. There was no unusual sideways force, and acceleration was normal, until it hit the titanium strip.
[...] in the case of the Challenger accident. But bear in mind that there you had a brilliant mind at work [...]
I'm not saying there is "another Feynman" on this thread, but some of the people so indiscriminately labeled (or should I say "libeled"?) as "amateurs" may be brilliant minds, and perhaps also backed up by years of analysing aviation accidents and socio-technical avionics problems, having written peer-reviewed and -acclaimed papers about the matter.
[...] widget factory goes bankrupt, is it entertaining to try and guess what mistakes the Chairman made to cause that to happen?
I guess it might be, although perhaps "entertaining" is the wrong word. Interesting or enlightening might be more like it. But it it will be a lot harder, because people are so much less deterministic than technical systems. We have speculated about the idea of applying the Why-Because-Analysis concept to purely social/socio-psychological phenomena, but never pursued it wholeheartedly.
Bernd