SpaceShipTwo accident caused by pilot error, lack of safeguards
Posted: Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 3:34 PM ET (1934 GMT)
Last October's crash of Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo vehicle was caused by pilot error that was not foreseen by the vehicle's developers, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded Tuesday. The NTSB said that the vehicle's copilot prematurely unlocked the feathering system on the vehicle during the October 31 test, and aerodynamic forces caused the feather to deploy as the vehicle accelerated through the sound barrier. Engineers at Scaled Composites, who developed SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic, knew that an early feather deployment would be "catastrophic" for the vehicle but did not consider that the pilots might accidentally unlock the feather early, and thus did not put in safeguards to prevent that from happening. The NTSB made a number of recommendations to the FAA to improve its review of experimental permit applications and make other steps to examine human factors in such vehicles.
Last October's crash of Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo vehicle was caused by pilot error that was not foreseen by the vehicle's developers, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded Tuesday. The NTSB said that the vehicle's copilot prematurely unlocked the feathering system on the vehicle during the October 31 test, and aerodynamic forces caused the feather to deploy as the vehicle accelerated through the sound barrier. Engineers at Scaled Composites, who developed SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic, knew that an early feather deployment would be "catastrophic" for the vehicle but did not consider that the pilots might accidentally unlock the feather early, and thus did not put in safeguards to prevent that from happening. The NTSB made a number of recommendations to the FAA to improve its review of experimental permit applications and make other steps to examine human factors in such vehicles.| <<previous article | next article>> |
|
news in brief
|
|
|
|
news links
|
|
Friday, June 12
ESA Seeks European Footprints On The Moon After Artemis III
Aviation Week — 6:24 am ET (1024 GMT) Arrakihs, the first ESA mission led by Spain to study the hidden history of galaxies
ICE-CSIC — 6:23 am ET (1023 GMT) How data centers in space could become a reality
Axios — 6:18 am ET (1018 GMT) Quantum Space’s military SPAC is trying to catch SpaceX’s IPO wave
TechCrunch — 6:16 am ET (1016 GMT) SpaceX to close above $2 trillion market cap on its debut, prediction market traders say
CNBC — 6:16 am ET (1016 GMT) |
