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Re: Magnaflux

To: "W. R. Gibbons" <gibbons@northpole.med.uvm.edu>
Subject: Re: Magnaflux
From: Phil Ethier <ethier@freenet.msp.mn.us>
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 1997 13:55:22 -0600 (CST)
On Thursday, 6 Mar 1997, W. R. Gibbons wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Mar 1997, Dave Williams wrote:

> This thread reminds me of an old movie, No Highway in the Sky, starring 
> James Stewart as a "boffin" who calculates that the tail assembly will 
> fall off a new airplane at x hours.  This is just an interesting 
> engineering problem to him, until he gets on one of the airplanes that is 
> near his calculated maximum hours.

No, you do him a disservice.  He was trying to convince everybody that 
the "Reindeer" was unsafe and needed a re-design.  The tail section he 
had in his hanger under a stress test had "failed to fail" and folks told 
him he was wrong.  Turned out the test tail took longer to fail because 
of a temperature factor.  It eventually did fail, and then a report came
in that a Reindeer had the tail fall off while taxiing.  He was 
vindicated.

He was convinced that he should stop the take-off of a Reindeer at Gander, 
Newfoundland.  He was in the cockpit arguing about it, and decided to take 
action.  He retracted the gear and belly-flopped the plane.

It was a very good movie along the lines of the play "Enemy of the 
People" (by Ibsen?).  I suggest a rental, if it's available.

The Challenger disaster made me think of this movie.  There were 
engineers at the booster company who knew the ship should not launch.  
They were overruled by management.

Phil

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