On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that a co-pilot's mistake was to blame in the October 2014 crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, which killed the co-pilot and injured the pilot over the Mojave Desert, where the craft was being tested.
The NTSB added that Scaled Composites, the aerospace company that had built the SpaceShipTwo craft for Virgin Galactic and employed the two pilots, did not adequately consider the consequences of a human error such as the one that occurred and did not build fail-safes into the craft to compensate for that error.
The approximate cause of the crash was determined rather quickly—not two days after SpaceShipTwo appeared to explode in the sky 10 miles up, NTSB chairman Christopher Hart faulted an early deployment of “feathering mode,” which changes the direction of the craft's wings to slow it down for descent. As SpaceShipTwo was still in powered flight, the high-drag configuration could have caused the plane to break up.
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment