Reassessment of Role : Shuttle Puts Spotlight on Engineers
They are the people behind technology: anonymous engineers to whom controversy typically is a debate over the principles of thermodynamics or structural mechanics. Sometimes, however, the outcome of such disputes is a matter of life and death.
That was the case when Morton Thiokol Inc. rocket engineers--afraid of the effects of cold weather on the rubber seals of giant booster rockets--waged their futile 11th-hour battle with company superiors to delay the space shuttle launch in January. It is a story with troubling echoes from past tragedies.
From DC-10s to Ford Pintos to nuclear power plant projects, engineers have risked careers to sound safety alarms that were ignored by their management only to be proven right, at times, by catastrophic events--by disabled jumbo jets plummeting to earth or by compact cars erupting into hellish infernos.
Warnings of Experts
When Challenger exploded in an angry fireball 73 seconds after liftoff on a frosty Florida morning, it may have been less a failure of American technology than the latest illustration of management failure to heed the warnings of its technical experts.
And even as the search for more definitive answers to what caused the accident continues, one question already raised is whether the shuttle disaster might prompt reassessment throughout industry of the engineer’s role in critical management decisions.
“It certainly should,” Seymour Melman, professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University, said. “Engineers have no real opportunity to be responsible if they aren’t given authority. Look at those rocket people. The key people--the people who did the (rocket booster engineering) work--had no final authority” to block the launch.
Criteria for Decisions
He said Thiokol officials who dismissed the objections of their engineers apparently applied decision-making “criteria unique to management--having to do with profitability, security of contracts, positions of the managers in the executive hierarchy . . . but not the strengths of materials or designs.”
Dale Bridenbaugh--a General Electric nuclear engineer in 1976 when he resigned from the Brown’s Ferry nuclear power plant project in Alabama and criticized the industry’s commitment to safety--said disclosure of engineering disputes should be required in any safety review process.
“I don’t think it’s possible for every (minor design) decision to be reviewed, but engineering disagreements certainly could be made part of any official record,” said Bridenbaugh, now president of the San Jose consulting firm MHB Technical Associates.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission or National Aeronautics and Space Administration, for example, “could easily ask a contractor to identify any occasion when technical disputes came up. I suspect something like that will be done in the future,” he said.
Near-Unanimous Opposition
Had such a disclosure requirement been in effect the night of Jan. 27, it would have reflected near-unanimous engineering opposition to a cold weather shuttle launch. On that night, warnings of potential peril were sounded in urgent tones by men regarded as among the industry’s best rocket engineers. Among them were men like:
--Allan J. McDonald, 48, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on solid propellant rockets. He is chairman of an industry committee on solid rocket boosters for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. After he and fellow engineers failed to delay the launch, McDonald refused to sign his company’s official launch authorization papers.
--Roger Boisjoly, a journeyman aerospace engineer whose memos six months earlier had warned management that “we stand in jeopardy of losing a flight” because of problems with the rocket seals. He had pushed to create a company task force on the problem and then complained when management support seemed to lag.
--Arnold Thompson, acknowledged as one of the industry’s top experts on rocket seals by the very executives who ignored his launch-eve warnings of peril. In desperation, he had resorted to drawing pictures for Thiokol managers until he and Boisjoly realized that they “couldn’t get anyone to listen.”
In the end, the profound safety concerns of about a dozen engineering experts were overruled by a panel of four vice presidents.
“We listened to their reasons more than their intensity,” Gerald Mason, one of those Thiokol vice presidents, told a presidential commission investigating the accident. In other testimony, he and various officials from Thiokol and NASA have defended their launch decision on grounds that the engineers presented “inconclusive data” that failed to prove the launch would be unsafe.
“Instead of having to prove it was safe, these engineers had to prove it was unsafe--management shifted the criteria,” Columbia’s Melman said. “From an engineering standpoint, that’s unpardonable.”
Harsh Comments
Today, investigators regard failure of the rocket booster seals as the prime suspect in the crash that killed seven shuttle crewmen, and members of the presidential commission have commented harshly on management’s failure to respond more cautiously to engineering warnings.
The accident may also contribute to the growing pressure on professional engineering societies to take more aggressive roles in support of engineers who encounter retaliation from employers.
“It’s important to remember that engineers are in position to appreciate best the consequences and dangers of any system or product,” said Prof. Vivian Weil of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions.
“So, they ought to be supported when they expose their careers (to damage) out of a sense of professional responsibility.”
She said the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers has been among the most assertive. It has investigated harassment allegations, formally recognized the public service contributions of whistle-blowing engineers and supported litigation brought against employers by fired engineers.
Ethical Conduct Panel
Also, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics--which includes among its 33,000 members some of the Thiokol rocket engineers--recently created an ethical conduct panel empowered to investigate allegations, for example, of management retaliation or harassment.
Ken Randle, chairman of the AIAA’s professional ethics subcommittee, conceded that engineers caught up in such controversies can find themselves on “a treacherous path.” He said the ethics panel, which has yet to receive its first complaint, is prepared to support engineers by conducting impartial inquiries into charges brought by its members.
Several states also have passed laws prohibiting retaliatory actions against employees who warn of safety hazards involving their companies--adopting the so-called “public policy exception.” Utah is not one of those states, however.
There have been no reported threats of retaliation against the outspoken engineers of Thiokol. In fact, Thiokol executive Mason reportedly went to each of the engineers involved in the pre-launch dispute to assure them that they were free to tell their stories to investigators.
“Nobody’s going to be fired,” said a longtime Thiokol employee, flatly dismissing the threat of any management retaliation.
Retaliation Not Uncommon
However, retaliation is not uncommon. Other engineers have paid heavy penalties for their candid disclosure of safety concerns.
Harley Copp, for example, an executive engineer with Ford who emerged as a harsh critic of the Pinto compact car while he was in charge of crash tests for the company, was fired in 1976. He later assisted the attorneys for Pinto crash victims in legal action that revealed that Ford managers had weighed economic factors before delaying design modifications that would have reduced the car’s vulnerability to gas tank fires from rear-end collisions.
In Northern California, three engineers who worked on the Bay Area Rapid Transit project were fired after they called the newly built BART system unsafe. And when an accident injured five passengers a few months later, an independent state investigation subsequently confirmed a number of safety problems that required design changes. The engineers eventually won legal damages of about $75,000 each in 1975.
More recently in Miami, Sarosh Dhondy, assistant chief structural engineer on Dade County’s $1-billion Metrorail mass transit project, was fired in December, 1982, after advising state transportation officials of structural flaws in that system. Months later, after enduring hostility and ridicule from county officials, Dhondy’s allegations that the flaws compromised safety were echoed in a federal investigative report. One county official telephoned the fired engineer to apologize.
Complaints of Harassment
In Knoxville, Jerry Smith--a senior nuclear engineer with the Tennessee Valley Authority--filed harassment complaints last year with the U.S. Department of Labor alleging that he was demoted and received repeated death threats after he reported welding problems and a “quality assurance breakdown in inspection of safety grade electrical cables” in construction of the Watts Bar nuclear power plant. His employers denied the allegations, which are under investigation by federal regulatory agencies.
This week the Labor Department ordered the TVA to give another engineer, Mansour Guity, four years of back pay and two promotions, saying Guity had been denied advancement after reporting problems with welds and cables at Watts Bar.
And Richard Parks, a Bechtel engineer working on the $1-billion cleanup project at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in 1983, was laid off “as a result of his exposing . . . safety concerns to his management and the NRC,” a federal investigation found.
Project managers had dismissed the young engineer’s warnings that a crane expected to lift a 160-ton radioactive reactor vessel from the nuclear plant’s crippled Unit 2 might be unsafe. The crane had been damaged during the 1979 nuclear accident at the plant and since then had not been properly tested for lifting such heavy loads, Parks had argued. He said that if the crane dropped the reactor vessel, it could set off another dangerous nuclear incident.
Made Concern Public
When it became clear that the crane would be used despite Parks’ concerns, he took the drastic step of expressing his alarm publicly. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered an investigation, the cleanup was delayed and subsequent tests confirmed Parks’ worries--the crane was defective. When those findings came out, however, Parks already was out of his job.
More than a year later the radioactive equipment finally was removed. Nonetheless, the repaired crane repeatedly malfunctioned, at times while the massive reactor vessel was dangling overhead.
“God only knows what might have happened if (Parks) had been content with simply making his objections in a memo,” said Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project in Washington.
“He was very effective in his dissent because he was willing to stick his neck out far enough to make a difference instead of just far enough to make a record. But he also has had to start (his career) over from scratch,” said Devine, whose organization represents federal whistle-blowers.
Devine predicted that the Thiokol engineers eventually will suffer also for telling their stories publicly.
“At best, once the publicity dies down, their careers are probably at a dead end,” he said. “I’m afraid that in the next year or two things might become quite uncomfortable for them.”
Corporate Etiquette
Should Thiokol engineers have gone over the heads of their vice presidents--violating corporate etiquette and chains of command--in an independent effort to reach high-ranking NASA officials or a congressman with their concerns?
“I decline to answer whether someone should commit professional suicide in the public interest,” Devine said. “Had they taken that step, it’s more likely they would have been testifying (before the presidential commission) as ex-employees of Thiokol.”
Although there is no evidence that Thiokol engineers considered such a strategy, McDonald, stationed at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch, did continue lobbying for delay even after superiors gave their go-ahead and signed the launch authorization form that McDonald rejected.
“It took a lot of courage, but that’s the kind of guy Al is,” said the AIAA’s Randle, a longtime friend of McDonald.
It is rare for the public to get such a fresh and detailed glimpse of engineering disputes. It took three years and a team of lawyers, for example, to uncover clues to an internal debate over proven design flaws on the DC-10.
‘Fundamental Deficiency’
They came in a memorandum by F. D. Applegate, director of product engineering for the Convair division of General Dynamics--builders of the DC-10 fuselage for McDonnell Douglas. Applegate’s memo described a “fundamental deficiency” in the airplane. If a poorly designed cargo door failed, the aircraft was susceptible to catastrophic failure from sudden explosive decompression in the passenger cabin.
“It seems to me inevitable that, in the 20 years ahead of us, DC-10 cargo doors will come open, and I would expect this to usually result in the loss of the airplane,” the engineer wrote in June, 1972.
A management superior responded in a subsequent memo that Applegate’s engineering concerns posed “an interesting legal and moral problem” since Convair did not want to confuse or negate delicate contract negotiations under way with McDonnell Douglas at the time. The Convair program manager added that he did “not take issue with the facts or concern expressed” but noted that the cargo door latch “satisfied FAA requirements and therefore the airplane was theoretically safe.”
Applegate’s engineering recommendations were not implemented.
Door Latch Failed
Two years later a cargo door latch failed on a Turkish Airlines DC-10. Explosive decompression in the cabin caused the floors to collapse, severing vital control lines in the belly of the plane. Applegate’s nightmare came true in a devastated forest outside Paris where 346 passengers died.
Last week as William P. Rogers presided over the shuttle accident hearings, the former secretary of state bristled at NASA and Thiokol management testimony that seemed tinged with the logic used a decade earlier by the manager who called the DC-10 theoretically safe because it met FAA-approved specifications. NASA officials, for example, said they followed all pre-launch regulations when they accepted Thiokol management’s official launch approval. There was no official requirement to act on the concerns of individual engineers, they testified.
Rogers, shaking his head, finally exclaimed that NASA’s “by-the-book” management approach had eliminated “elements of judgment and good sense.”
Such observations angered management officials both at NASA and Thiokol.
“Ultimately, managers have to make all the critical decisions; that’s the way it always works--always will,” insisted an executive close to the men who approved the shuttle launch.
“And they’re not going to quit,” added the executive, who asked not to be identified. “No, they’ll go right back next time and make another gut-wrenching decision. They have to. That’s their job.”
Times researchers Wendy Leopold in Chicago and Susanna Shuster in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
