When there are safety concerns, what is the engineers responsibility before the launch decision is made?

CASE STUDIES Before starting to learn the theoretical ideas regarding engineering ethics and before looking at some interesting real-life cases that will illustrate these ideas, let’s begin by looking at a very well-known engineering ethics case: the space

6 1.8 Case Studies

shuttle Challenger accident. This case is presented in depth at the end of this chap- ter, but at this point we will look at a brief synopsis of the case to further illustrate the types of ethical issues and questions that arise in the course of engineering practice.

Many readers are already familiar with some aspects of this case. The space shuttle Challenger was launched in extremely cold weather. During the launch, an O-ring on one of the solid-propellant boosters, made more brittle by the cold, failed. This failure led to an explosion soon after liftoff. Engineers who had designed this booster had concerns about launching under these cold conditions and recom- mended that the launch be delayed, but they were overruled by their management (some of whom were trained as engineers), who didn’t feel that there were enough data to support a delay in the launch. The shuttle was launched, resulting in the well-documented accident.

On the surface, there appear to be no engineering ethical issues here to dis- cuss. Rather, it seems to simply be an accident. The engineers properly recom- mended that there be no launch, but they were overruled by management. In the strictest sense, this can be considered an accident—no one wanted the Challenger to explode—but there are still many interesting questions that should be asked. When there are safety concerns, what is the engineer’s responsibility before the launch decision is made? After the launch decision is made, but before the actual launch, what duty does the engineer have? If the decision doesn’t go the engineer’s way, should she complain to upper management? Or should she bring the problem to the attention of the press? After the accident has occurred, what are the duties and responsibilities of the engineers? If the launch were successful, but the postmortem showed that the O-ring had failed and an accident had very nearly occurred, what would be the engineer’s responsibility? Even if an engineer moves into manage- ment, should he separate engineering from management decisions?

These types of questions will be the subject of this book. As an engineer, you will need to be familiar with ideas about the nature of the engineering profession, ethi- cal theories, and the application of these theories to situations that are likely to occur in professional practice. Looking at other real-life cases taken from newspaper accounts and books will help you examine what engineers should do when con- fronted with ethically troubling situations. Many cases will be postmortem examina- tions of disasters, while others may involve an analysis of situations in which disaster was averted when many of the individuals involved made ethically sound choices and cooperated to solve a problem.

A word of warning is necessary: The cliché “Hind-sight is 20/20” will seem very true in engineering ethics case studies. When studying a case several years after the fact and knowing the ultimate outcome, it is easy to see what the right decision should have been. Obviously, had the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) owned a crystal ball and been able to predict the future, the Challenger would never have been launched. Had Ford known the number of people who would be killed as a result of gas-tank failures in the Pinto and the sub- sequent fi nancial losses in lawsuits and criminal cases, it would have found a better solution to the problem of gas-tank placement. However, we rarely have such clear predictive abilities and must base decisions on our best guess of what the outcome will be. It will be important in studying the cases presented here to try to look at them from the point of view of the individuals who were involved at the time, using their best judgment about how to proceed, and not to judge the cases solely based on the outcome.