Branson’s Video Statement on NTSB Findings
16 responses to “Branson’s Video Statement on NTSB Findings”
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As much as it pains me to say it I have to agree with mr B here. scaled developed the ship, the feather and the unlock mechanism. They designed SS2, which was always going to be a “commercial” design without safety guards against human error. This accident was waiting to happen right from the very first flight of SS2, so that fault lives firmly with Scaled.
I hate the way he has distanced himself and put all blame on scaled and not accepted some joint involvement, but it does appear that they were right. Scaleds initial design effectively included a self destruct button with no safety lockout.
And Branson was all set to fly that ship the absolute minimum number of additional times and then climbing aboard with his son Sam aboard to begin commercial service. This accident may have saved their lives — or those of some of Virgin’s high net worth customers. It might even have saved the whole company.
The feather mechanism was not the only problem with the ship or with the program. Read the Wall Street Journal story. It has some damning things in it. And there’s a lot more that hasn’t become public. http://www.parabolicarc.com…
I was thinking the same myself earlier on today. That this accident occurred was probably (and it pains me to say it) a good thing (albeit not for the co-pilot and his family). It resulted in the loss of a single life, rather than an inevitable loss of multiple lives further down the line due to an unsafe vehicle design. Given the design of the vehicle, the outcome we got was the lesser of possible evils. Like I say little comfort to the deceased.
“..the fault lives firmly with Scaled “
really? he forgets to mention that a VG pilot and their current VP of Safety was in charge of the Mission Control Room the day of the accident. Plus more than half of the engineers on the consoles were VG engineers. Oh, let’s not forget that a VG pilot was PIC on WK2 and another was flying chase.
All of them were involved in all the sim sessions, and the briefings. They had plenty of opportunity to voice any concerns.
It is disgraceful that VG now says it was all Scaled’s fault.
If you think Scaled developed SS2 in a vacuum without pressure or input from VG, then you have no idea what really goes on in MHV.
Agreed. The flight test program VG was,pursuing was aggressive, dangerous. The flight would have nearly doubled burn time with a new type of engine on its first test flight. This was a joint flight, as were all the previous ones VG was happy to share credit on.
I’d agree that VG were pursuing a daft programme schedule, but surely Scaled as the prime contractor must have agreed to the flight. In the industries I have worked in (primarily mining), if a major contractor thinks something is unsafe they will (often) refuse to do it (although in truth, it does happen that the client has to stop the contractor from doing unsafe things as well).
I don’t really have a problem with “blame contractor for failure”, “take credit for success”. This is normal practice in pretty much every industry, and is part of the reason why large chunks of money change hands between the two parties.
VG don’t appear to be running a very tight ship (and I’m not a fan), but there is really no getting around Scaled being at fault.
Mothers, dont let your children grow up to be Scaled cowboys….
What’s your point? You always throw your blame at VG, whereas I think I have a more realistic view that the blame lies across the board. I enjoy the info you post in this site, but I don’t think you are particularly impartial (which is a problem for a journalist).
My favorite quote about flight test comes from Chuck Yeager’s autobiography:
“By definition, a prototype was an unproven, imperfect machine….Some defects were obvious….But other problems…might be discovered late in a program, only after hundreds of hours of flying time. The test pilot’s job was to discover all the flaws, all the potential killers.
“Testing was lengthy and complicated, resulting in hundreds of major and minor changes before an aircraft was accepted in the Air Force’s inventory.”
This is why the flight test schedule Virgin was on last year scared the hell out of me. I could see an accident coming, I feared they would push the machine or the pilots or both too far too fast. Last summer, I seriously debated leaving Mojave before that happened. From a journalistic standpoint, it’s a helluva story. From a human standpoint, it’s a tough thing to watch. When you see something coming and can’t do a damned thing about it, that knowledge becomes a painful thing.
I sat in an office at the Mojave spaceport about 10 days before this flight and predicted that I’d be out at Koehn Lake looking up at the sky, they’d drop this thing over my head, and it would explode. Didn’t happen exactly the way I thought, but the result was the same. And that’s flight test. It’s sometimes the stuff you don’t see coming that bites you.
As Yeager said, if you don’t do a proper flight test program and find all the problems, then you push that out into the future and get a lot of people killed. In this case, it turns your billionaire founder and your high net worth ticket holders into test subjects.
“clean bill of health”, “healing”… Branson is either completely ignorant of the true situation with SS2, which would allow him to claim ‘plausible denial’, or is being extremely ‘economical with the truth’.
Either way, it hardly inspires confidence in VG and should make any current or future business partner think twice about getting involved with these characters.
He is foremost a salesman. He is peddling pure BS, and I imagine he knows it.
I know this goes beyond the scope of this investigation, but the incident certainly gives the impression that should SS2 suffer a catastrophic structural problem, the survival chances for any passengers would be very low.
I’m sure many of you will be more familiar with the proposed safety measures for passengers than I am. Will they be wearing parachutes? What training will they receive in using oxygen systems and dealing with the low pressure at altitude? Are they screened physically with high altitude parachute escape in mind?
The situation has echoes of the Apollo 1 fire in that a catastrophe was attributed to factors that with the benefit of hindsight appear obviously, possibly unacceptably, high risk. There also seems to have been a similar disconnect between client and contractor as well as huge time pressure to get the system up and running.
Hopefully this programme will also benefit from a period of soul searching and revision resulting in a safer system, but I can’t help thinking the prospect of a flight with Virgin Galactic seems a far less attractive – and safe – prospect than Branson’s ‘clean bill of health’ makes it sound.
I was also thinking of the lessons learned from the Apollo One fire. I’ve read many times that while tragic, it was fortunate that it occurred on the launch pad instead of in flight. Had it happened in flight, it would’ve been very difficult to investigate and determine the causes because the capsule would’ve been lost. As for SS2, the passengers were not going to wear parachutes or pressure suits. For the portions of the flight above about 65,000 feet, depressurization would’ve been fatal because blood will boil at body temperature. Parachutes would only help if they managed to be below about 50,000 feet (give or take) and the vehicle came apart cleanly with little tumbling. The goal of the design was to prevent depressurization so no pressure suits are needed. As for parachutes, unless you want to design systems as complex as military ejection seats, they likely would be of little use to untrained people. By way of comparison, XCor plans on using pressure suits with the Lynx but I don’t recall anything about them wearing parachutes.
My understanding is in the Lynx, both pilot and passenger have pressure suits, parachutes and bailout options. It is much more like a high performance fighter than SpaceShipTwo is.
Really, SpaceShipTwo is more like a high altitude business jet, which means options for the passengers when things go wrong are pretty much to hang on to their seats and hope it holds together until they land.
That’s pretty much my understanding as well. Concorde used to cruise as high as 60,000 feet without pressure suits or parachutes. Some business jets can cruise as high as 51,000 feet. In either case, depressurization would be very serious, as the case of what happened with Payne Stewart proved years ago. While Lynx doesn’t allow people to float around in weightlessness, I’ve always been more attracted to it than SS2 because the passenger sits next to the pilot. I’m a private pilot and that appeals to me a great deal. Having better options in an emergency appeals to me as well.
I don’.t know. It depends a lot on what sort of spacecraft you build. A SpaceShipTwo flight test is very expensive. That’s in large part due to the need to replace the entire engine after every flight.
Lynx flight tests are theoretically very inexpensive, if the vehicle works as designed. It’s designed as gas and go (although it’s a bit more complicated than that) with multiple flights possible each day. I think it will take a while to get there, and a lot depends on the robustness of the vehicle and its systems. But, they do talk about doing 100 powered flight tests of the Lynx Mark I.
XCOR’s development costs have been a fraction of Virgin Galactic’s costs. We’ll see if that produces a reliable, rugged vehicle or not.