Human Error nearly sinks India submarine

P

phavoc

Emperor Mongoose
Just as a reminder, even in this day and age of automation and smart-everything, never underestimate the power of human error! In the below article link someone forgot to dog the external hatch of an Indian Akula-class submarine and it flooded the engineering section. While hatches aren't airlocks, I believe the type-S scout has a direct-access door from engineering directly to space. Atmosphere venting doesn't quite work the same way, but just imagine if someone leaves the rear hatch open and the scoutship decides to do an ocean refueling by landing in the water...

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/open-hatch-nearly-sunk-indias-new-3-billion-nuclear-missile-submarine-59812
 
Sees unlikely, as undoubtedly you'd get a warning beep in the cockpit, that the airlock is open.

Unless the circuits were damaged or weren't maintained.
 
Kind of like it seems unlikely someone would forget to close the engineering hatch and there was no warning or notice by the crew.

But it happened.
 
There are a ot of jokes about the Indian military and civilian contractors.

However, this might be the work of a Pakistani infiltrator.
 
This is as equally boneheaded as everything else (USS Fitzgerald?) but it gets extra press because people think leaving a hatch or seacock open on a ship or submarine is funny, whereas not being able to operate an entire ship (Fitzgerald) is just tragic (though I suspect some degree of institutional error is responsible for this submarine too). No criticism aimed at anyone in this thread. The increasing reliance on automation may indeed be cause for concern in some fields.
 
As we've seen in some of the recent naval and air accidents, a lack of experience and training coupled with an over reliance upon automation can indeed lead to accidents and deaths. Combined they work great and balance one another out. But leaning too heavily on automation means not having the necessary skills to handle a crisis when it occurs. Granted the number of crises are reduced, but anyone in the software business can explain the recently-discovered bug concept pretty well.
 
phavoc said:
As we've seen in some of the recent naval and air accidents, a lack of experience and training coupled with an over reliance upon automation can indeed lead to accidents and deaths. Combined they work great and balance one another out. But leaning too heavily on automation means not having the necessary skills to handle a crisis when it occurs. Granted the number of crises are reduced, but anyone in the software business can explain the recently-discovered bug concept pretty well.
Click to expand...

Bugs arise from human errors. Human errors are as old as humanity. Grace Hopper invented the phrase "bug" for computers when she tracked down a computer error to an insect stuck in a machine (edit: Apparenty the phrase was in use before, but she found the first actual insect bug). A few years later Alan Turing proved that a generic computer program that can check any other computer program for all bugs can't exist due to logical paradoxes: even if you had an infinitely fast computer with infinite memory, you could find a finite program you could not correctly check.

Bugs aren't ever going to go away. The way to prevent distasters is testing the systems and training the personnel. Not cutting corners "777-max" style helps too.
 
The Triple Seven Ecks is going to be delayed; I'm going to speculate that Boeing engineers are crawling all over the airplane and triple checking the design for faults.

The Seven three seven max is piling up, despite production dropping from fifty plus to forty plus per month; airlines are demanding compensation for lost air time, especially the Chinese.

If there's a third crash, which is linked to the design, it's probably dead, and with it, the credibility of the American Air Safety agencies.
 
Yar, bone heads will never be in short supply.

It's the 737 max that is problematic. The 777 is a typically safe Boeing aircraft. The only thing that one did was almost bankrupt the company. Clean sheet planes are Very expensive, hence the desire by both airbus and Boeing to do derivatives whenever possible.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top