The Airbus A380 as a Risk Assessment Case: Cracked Ribs Do Not Signal Good Health

Cause for concern are reports that European air safety officials have ordered inspections of cracks in the mounting brackets that attach the wings of the Airbus A380 – already a plane with a long history of delays, design issues and cost over-runs.

And if the bland assurances being spun by the manufacturer’s publicists – that “the cracking problem … is not a safety risk in the short- to medium-term” – reflect the company’s risk assessment attitude, then a suppressed but potential catastrophe is a matter of time – a mid-air disintegration with massive casualties and the subsequent grounding of an entire discredited fleet.

I am just winding up a month-long Risk Management teaching engagement, migrating an MBA-level curriculum to a class of undergraduates.[1]

Some recalibration has been involved. At the graduate level of business and law students, our focus is on the broken models and ineffective risk processes that have characterized the worlds of finance and banking, insurance, accountancy and professional services, over the years of the credit crisis. These run through the period -- from the collapse of Bear Stearns to that of MF Global; from rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel at Société Générale to his UBS counterpart, Kweku Adoboli; from the corruption of the American subprime mortgage market to that of Japanese corporate governance at Olympus.

Younger students stay with the basics – the human behaviors by which incentives are skewed, failures are rationalized away, and incipient disasters are hidden under the mistaken illogic that safety and soundness can be inferred, only because a breakdown “hasn’t happened yet.”

The discovery of cracks in the “rib feet” of the A380s presents a long-familiar challenge: what response is proper to the emergent symptoms of a potentially devastating event?

It is all too natural to put up an optimistic face – to admire success and to wish away the language of bad news. But the consequences can be dire:

• The late Steve Jobs may well have paid with his life for his denial-based postponement in treating his pancreatic cancer.

• The Italian liner Costa Concordia would most likely be cruising in comfort, rather than lying as a hulking wreck, had the supervisors tracking its earlier near-shore wanderings acted on the ready GPS data revealing the captain’s record of reckless behavior.

• And the signs of corruption in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi operation were well within view, both to the SEC and to his investors, had they not chosen to turn blind eyes to the readily apparent.

Historical memory is hard to hold, especially where corporate budgets and profits and bonus payments depend on the wishful avoidance of delays, repairs and caution-based slow-downs.

But for learning directly applicable to the A380 and its cracks, my students have just scrutinized the 1986 case of the space shuttle Challenger – launched to its fatal explosion, before they were born, over the engineers’ objections that cold weather would threaten the flexibility of the eroded O-ring seals on its rocket booster.

The logical flaw in the shuttle case extends: The fact that prior launches had succeeded, despite O-ring erosion, did not provide comfort for future launches under other conditions. No more, that the A380s may have flown so far without incident despite wing bracket cracks – when such potential stresses as severe weather, hard landings or simple future wear-and-tear fatigue would change the failure calculations and render invalid the assumptions underlying margins of safety. 

In other words, paraphrasing with emphasis physicist Richard Feynman on the shuttle, “the A380 rib feet were not designed to crack. Cracking was a clue that something was wrong. Cracking was not something from which safety can be inferred.”  

In the Challenger case, seven astronauts and a space vehicle were lost to the deficiencies in NASA’s risk management. As for the A380, has any learning occurred?

As soon as my final grading is done, I will be uplifting for Paris and a spring-semester teaching gig with law students there.

But not on an A380. In its wounded state, I will be happy to book on the robust aircraft of an American airline.

 

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[1] My thanks and gratitude to the congenial community of Carthage College – faculty, administration, support and especially the students in my seminar – for a welcome and an experience as warm as this unseasonable winter in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

 

Comments

[A]

"I will be happy to book on the robust aircraft of an American airline."

Perhaps not on a BOEING 787: "Cracks detected in Boeing 787"

http://www.newzglobe.com/article/20120206/cracks-detected-boeing-787

The problem may be a "race to the bottom". In this industry, there are two manufacturers, BOEING and AIRBUS. When one takes shortcuts to save cost, the other may follow.