When you sit behind a computer screen for 95% of your work, it can be easy to forget that aircraft are genuinely dangerous.
Let’s get one important thing out of the way first: commercial air travel is one of, if not THE, safest form of transportation today. Between the demanding training all pilots must complete, the certification hoops to jump through for the FAA, the maintenance requirements for each aircraft in a fleet—there are innumerable checks and regulations for every possible aspect of air travel. That’s not even mentioning the rigorous testing of the aircraft themselves before they’re handed off to the airlines.
So I’m not talking about air travel. What I mean is, the process of working with and testing these vehicles is dangerous, just by their nature.
Spinning propellers can suck in loose clothing and slice flesh. Jet engines operate by ingesting large amounts of air, so walking in front (or behind) is a terrible idea. Electrical systems often operate at high voltages. Overheated or over-stressed components can catch fire.
Even a small UAV of barely 40 pounds, flying at 30 miles per hour, can cause serious damage to any object—or, god forbid, person—it might run into. Many of the ones I work with fly twice as fast and are at least three times the size.
Safety should always be the number one priority of any test, design, or operation, hands down. We owe it to ourselves and each other.
As a sort of introduction to this topic, I want to share a documentary that I watched earlier this year in a short course about flight testing. It steps through NASA’s mishap involving the X-31 technology demonstrator aircraft, and explores the chain of decisions that led to the events. You can watch it here:
Thankfully, the mishap had zero human casualties. It’s now become a valuable lesson about safety in testing and engineering.
The full video is about 40 minutes, but the description of the incident is in the first 15 or so. I’ll discuss it in tomorrow’s email, and include a short synopsis of what happened.