Engines
Fully concur.
The procedure cannot have mitigated the risk unless they had some strong evidence on how long it took connectors to come loose and under what flight conditions.
Perhaps the worst aspect is that the original SI (be it properly issued or not) said before flight. Then it was changed to every 15mins. There must have been the strong evidence you speak of to change this periodicity. Which doesn't detract form the fact it should have been a Class A at least, probably Class AA.
JFZ90
-re Mr Perks' evidence. The link you gave paraphrases his 6 pages of evidence in a few paragraphs. I was reading his actual submission, dated 4.9.01 and then points of clarification on 7.10.01 (the latter casting doubt on the validity of Boeing's simulation).
He concludes;
The real issue with the original E5 was that it highlighted the issue of the "quality" of the software—how it had been designed, how it had been documented, how it had been developed. A lot of testing was undertaken but that's a form of inspection—and it's now an accepted maxim that you can't really inspect quality into anything. In my view that basic quality was in question then, and it could never have really been corrected to a "flight safety critical" standard by subsequent patching. What Wilmington showed was that this new FADEC system had design weaknesses.
“Anomalies in testing should bring your organisation to a standstill. They are a violation of requirements. They are a clue something worse may happen”.
- Dr.
Sheila M E Widnall (US Secretary of the Air Force and investigator of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster).
In this case, instead of "standstill", read "Don't issue an RTS that hides the problems from aircrew".
Regards