Category: failure analysis

All the Work that Fits a Blog

Since we updated our website with a blog function in 2011, I more or less committed myself to posting a blog each month. Somehow, I more or less stuck with that commitment, but I just noticed that we did not post a new blog for January 2021. I also noticed that this happens to be… Read more »

Root Cause, Causal Factors, Proximate Causes Or Contributing Causes

Causal analysis is a surprisingly complex process that over the years has been subject to push and pulls from a wide variety of professional influences. When determining the actual cause of an accident or an incident, any number of stake holders would like to address the issue that “caused” the accident, whether to prevent a… Read more »

MAX1: Do People or Equipment Cause Ocean Pollution?

In the MAX1 study survey we included a few questions where we asked crews to tell us what their favorite Oily Water Separator brands are. We were very hesitant to include that question because there could be all types of weird bias and we would need a huge sample to makes sense of data where… Read more »

Rudderless Behavior

Technology failures are inevitable. The trick is to keep failures to a minimum and to keep failures in the “mostly harmless” category. Certain types of equipment can fail and the failure does not result in consequences that are too serious, while other types of equipment failures can make a mess of things almost right away…. Read more »

A Fatigue Engineering Joke

There is a Cold War (remember, that was before 1989) engineering joke that goes as follows: The Russians had built a brand new huge airplane, and it was the pride of Russia, but they had a continuous problem with fatigue fracturing at the wing to fuselage connection. They tried everything and it just kept fracturing…. Read more »