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Boeing Criticized in Shuttle Accident Report, but Brunt of Blame Borne by NASA

Posted on: Wednesday, 27 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Aug. 27--Boeing Co. escaped the brunt of the criticism in the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report released Tuesday.

Boeing, which maintains the space shuttles and supports NASA in a joint venture with Lockheed Martin Corp., moved the bulk of its shuttle engineering staff from Huntington Beach to Houston last year to be closer to NASA managers. Of 500 Boeing shuttle jobs that were moved, only about 100 Huntington Beach employees accepted transfers. The other 400 jobs were filled by new hires in Houston.

While Boeing's Houston engineers were cited in the accident board's report for a "crucial failure" in their assessment of potential damage to Columbia after the shuttle's wing was struck by a piece of foam that came loose after launch, the accident board said the flawed decision-making that contributed to February's disaster was attributable mostly to cultural and organizational problems at NASA.

"It's never one thing that goes wrong -- it's a series of elements that fail, and usually the people in charge fail as well," said Michel Merluzeau, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan's aerospace group. "There is more of an issue with NASA in this disaster than there is an issue for Boeing."

Boeing didn't comment on the board's specific findings Tuesday. The company said the "report is very thorough and is deserving of equally serious thought and response."

Boeing tried over the past two years to ensure that its engineers who didn't move from Huntington Beach to Houston passed on their expertise to replacements through questionnaires, videotapes and on-the-job training. However, the accident board concluded that "the implementation of the transition plan was incomplete and that the training of replacement personnel was not uniform."

Columbia's doomed mission was the first to be supported solely by Boeing's new Houston engineers without assistance from their more-experienced counterparts in Huntington Beach.

The loss of expertise became a factor during the mission when Boeing engineers in Houston were asked by NASA to run a computer analysis of the potential damage from the foam strike. The engineers used modeling software called Crater, which had been developed years before by their colleagues in Huntington Beach.

Allen Richardson, a retired Boeing engineer who developed Crater between 1979 and 1985, said the program was misused by inexperienced engineers in Houston.

"You'd have to be really low on experience ... to do such a stupid thing," said Richardson, who lives in Fullerton.

The 20-inch-long piece of foam that damaged Columbia was 400 times larger than the objects that Crater is designed to model. Nevertheless, Boeing's Houston engineers didn't seek assistance from the more-experienced engineers in Huntington Beach, the board found.

The Crater analysis predicted deep damage to the shuttle's thermal-protective tiles from the foam impact.

This "seemingly alarming" result suggested that the shuttle's underlying aluminum frame might be subject to extreme temperatures upon its reentry to Earth's atmosphere, the board found.

However, NASA and Boeing engineers discounted the Crater analysis, partly because the program tended to predict a deeper penetration than would actually occur when it was used to model the impact of smaller objects, the board found.

The blame for disregarding the Crater analysis ultimately lies with NASA, not Boeing's new hires in Houston, the board said. In fact, a study completed by NASA's Shuttle Program in October 2002 predicted that the move of Boeing functions from Huntington Beach to Houston would increase risk to shuttle missions through the end of 2003.

"NASA failed to connect the dots: The engineers who misinterpreted Crater -- a tool already unsuited to the task at hand -- were the very ones the Shuttle Program identified as engendering the most risk in their transition from Huntington Beach," the board wrote.

"I don't think NASA questioned the evidence hard enough," analyst Merluzeau said.

NASA and Boeing engineers who studied the Crater analysis wanted to ask the Pentagon for help in obtaining satellite and telescope photographs of the shuttle during its flight so that the damage could be further studied. However, the request was shot down as unnecessary by higher-ups at NASA, the board found.

When asked by board investigators why they were not more vocal about their concerns, the engineers "opined that by raising contrary points of view ... they would be singled out for possible ridicule by their peers and managers," the board wrote.

"It's (NASA's) culture in general that doesn't encourage people to speak their minds," said Marco Caceres, an aerospace analyst at the Teal Group in Virginia.

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(c) 2003, The Orange County Register, Calif. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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