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I think, as a lawyer, he's using the phase a "simple cause" to mean "a singular responsibility, culpability, and liability."

• FabHK 7y ago
  Probably. Goes to show that the lawyer representing the victims and the safety folks (NTSB etc.) trying to make sure an accident does not repeat have very different goals, incentives, ways of thinking, etc.
  • mieseratte 7y ago
    Given how vague the language is, I don't know that we can necessarily draw a conclusion. That "single item" might be the component-failure, that which fell through the aligned holes in the swiss-cheese, or it could be "the single layer of the system that was left out" that would have mitigated or otherwise precluding the class of failure. One could castigate Boeing for not having a more redundant use of sensors the MAX case, or one could say "Why don't you have 'hackers' as a part of your process, whose job it is to find these classes of problems and raise all hell when they do." Then again based on the phrasing "single, simple cause" I'm more inclined to say you're on the money. That the lawyer is looking at the component-failure rather than "avoiding non-redundant systems" as a class of problem to solve.
    • salawat 7y ago
      The single simple cause he may be alluding to is greed. Lawyers aren't interested in the technical minutiae except in as much as it can be useful in communicating intent to the jury. "Why did you decide to only use one sensor to feed such a critical system?" "Why did it not occur to anyone to reevaluate the safety rating when the software was changed?" "Was there any pressure to not do as thorough an analysis as possible?" What I would do as an attorney is cross examine everyone involved to establish that there was a clear and present intent to put the completion of the product on time ahead of completing the project in total compliance with federal regulations. It's proving intent to the jury that matters. Not arguing over the finer points of aircraft design. In fact, I'd be surprised if anyone with an aviation background would even make it passed voir dire unchallenged.
      • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        Yes. He's certainly not going to approach this like an engineer going bug hunting. The goal will be to establish that the problem was cultural and political. An avoidable cascade of engineering failures and regulatory misrepresentations was the result, not the cause.
    • magduf 7y ago
      Yeah, I think the language used there just isn't being that precise, by engineering standards, that's all. When you're assigning blame for something like an aircraft crash, what you want to single out is errors which were preventable. So, for instance, icing on critical sensors probably isn't preventable 100%, so that's why we do things like have redundant sensors, algorithms about how to use that sensor data to avoid letting a bad sensor reading cause a big problem, etc. Another thing that isn't preventable is weather, of course, so we engineer things to handle that. But preventable errors, especially ones which we've already learned how to handle in the past, are generally considered unforgivable and worthy of assigning blame. A crash caused by a Russian AA missile isn't really avoidable for a passenger jet, so we don't blame the pilot or the aircraft maker or airline. A crash caused by using a single sensor that's known to ice up and is used for a system that's only there because someone thought it'd be a great idea to slap some oversize engines on an obsolete airframe from the 60s in the wrong position, however, is clearly a preventable error.
  • SilasX 7y ago
    "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."