Human psychology and the role it plays in decision making under uncertainty.
Those who cannot remember the past of human factors are doomed to repeat it…
With apologies to the philosopher George Santayana, I’ll make the point that the BMW Head Up Display technology is in fact not the unalloyed blessing premised by BMW in their marketing material.
The NTSB has released it’s interim report on the Boeing 787 JAL battery fire and it appears that Boeing’s initial safety assessment had concluded that the only way in which a battery fire would eventuate was through overcharging. Continue Reading…
The ATSB has released it’s preliminary report of it’s investigation into the Cleveland street overrun accident which I covered in an earlier post, and it makes interesting reading.
On the subject of near misses…
Presumably the use of the crew cab as an escape pod was not actually high on the list of design goals for the 4000 and 4100 class locomotives, and thankfully the locomotives involved in the recent derailment at Ambrose were unmanned.
Occasional readers of this blog might have noticed my preoccupation with unreliable airspeed and the human factors and system design issues that attend it. So it was with some interest that I read the recent paper by Sathy Silva of MIT and Roger Nicholson of Boeing on aviation accidents involving unreliable airspeed.
But, we tested it? Didn’t we?
Earlier reports of the Boeing 787 lithium battery initial development indicated that Boeing engineers had conducted tests to confirm that a single cell failure would not lead to a cascading thermal runaway amongst the remaining batteries. According to these reports their tests were successful, so what went wrong?
Well it sounded reasonable…
One of the things that’s concerned me for a while is the potentially malign narrative power of a published safety case.
I tend towards the integrative rather than reductionist view of engineering and science. I'm interested in emergence, networks, relationships and interfaces as they apply to safety.
