Last week, I shared a documentary about the loss of an X-31 experimental aircraft and some of my most critical takeaways from the incident.
One thought really stands out to me. One interviewee mentions that everyone involved in the program should have understood the aircraft design and risks. Turnover of the testing team likely resulted in multiple personnel not fully appreciating how unique the airplane was.
Here’s where this testing attitude differs from the kind of UAV design and fielding I talk about: we don’t have the luxury of everyone holding that full understanding.
Over the lifetime of a platform, you’ll have a constantly shifting team of flight operations personnel, engineers, program managers. You’ll have folks straight out of college who just joined the company working alongside the people who did the original CAD eight years ago.
On top of that, your actual operators, your customers, sure as hell won’t have the same appreciation of the aircraft as an engineer would. They’ll know what they are taught.
But they see this vehicle as a tool, and they won’t have the institutional knowledge and gut feelings of the people who designed it.
What does that mean? To quote the documentary, safety is everybody’s business.
And it starts with the engineering. You need to cultivate a mindset of identifying and evaluating all risks, from the worst-case possibilities to simple human gaffes.