Dozy;
Re, "Whether we're talking about NASA in the case of the Challenger and Columbia disasters, the FAA and McDonnell-Douglas in the case of the DC-10, . . .", others may accept that the two cases are similar but just for the record, for a host of reasons that have to do with individual, group and corporate behaviours and how knowledge was formed and subsequently reified within the two respective organizations, I would never include the DC10 case in any category that suggests that the two (NASA/Challenger, McD/DC10) are examples of the same phenomenon or are of the same character; in my view they are not. For a good understanding of the difference between the two,
The DC-10 Case has to be read alongside
.
I certainly don't want to re-argue anything here and there are elements of the same behaviours in terms of the normalization of deviance and other phenomena discussed in Vaughn but a key difference is, for example, expressed by
Peter French: "There can be little doubt that many engineers and managerial personnel at McDonnell Douglas (and Convair) knew, well before the Paris crash, of the potential for a Class IV hazard* due to defective design of the DC-10 cargo door latching system and the floor structure.", *A Class IV hazard is a hazard involving danger to life. (The DC-10 Case; A Study in Applied Ethics, Technology, and Society, ed. John H. Fielder, Douglas Birsch, SUNY, 1992, New York, p.178).