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The revised fatality count was 110 persons.
Yes, we’re going to be respectful to the victims and their families. Of course, we are. And I think part of that respect is very honestly looking for a cause and how to prevent similar disasters in the future.
complexity —> accident
And that’s the main idea of the system accident theory, that complexity comes at a higher cost than we generally acknowledge.
The valuejet crash occurred because of a single point failure. NOT a complex one. Old oxygen generators that had been replaced and left in a box on the plane with several being uncapped. One of the uncapped generators ignited, and created both heat, and oxygen that significantly lowered the ignition temperature of surrounding materials. The resulting fire brought down the plane.
Someone not doing their job properly is not really an example of 'complexity' causing unforeseen consequences or costs. It could be that an added complexity of someone else double checking the maintenance crews work might have prevented a simple human error.
And the theory that complexity, itself, is a contributory cause is ironically simplistic. Doing ANYTHING regardless of how simple or complex it might be entails risks and the potential for the unforeseen.
In fact, a serious argument can be made for the idea that simplicity is more likely to have negative consequences, BECAUSE simplistic thinking fails to envision the complexity inherent in some tasks we chose to take on.
Example: There is no doubt that a solid steering column is a simpler and more direct means of connecting a steering wheel to the rack and pinion steering of a car. But that simplicity resulted in people being killed by the steering column piercing their chest in otherwise survivable collisions. A collapsible steering column is no doubt more complex, yet it eliminated those kinds of injuries.
By the same token, there is no doubt that a modern airliner is vastly more complex than the early radial engined airliners. And yet, air travel has become vastly safer as a direct result of added complexity, BECAUSE flying thru the air
safely turns out to be a complex problem to solve. We literally went 10 full years without a single commercial airline fatality in the US, a far better record of per mile flown passenger safety than that ever attained with more simple systems of earlier eras. Despite the fact that in 1929 only 6,000 passengers flew on US airliners, compared to 674 million carried in 2021.
So complexity is often the Solution to making systems less prone to failure, or less likely to fail from a single cause. To Wit. A four engine aircraft has FOUR TIMES the chance of an engine failure as a single engine aircraft. But then, the failure of your single engine carries a far greater potential cost than having 3 of your 4 engines still working. Which is why all transoceanic airlines were required to have 4 engines. The number of required engines was only dropped to 2 as fanjet engines proved, thru hundreds of thousands of operational hours, to be five times as reliable as piston engines.
While its a great idea to have fewer points of potential failure in any system, rather often, the only way to reduce single point failure is to create systems with redundancy, or sufficient complexity that a catastrophic event would require Multiple things to go wrong in a causal chain, thereby reducing the likelihood that all those opportunities to break the causal chain had been missed.
