"Sue Duckles wrote: NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed
Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the
agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key
spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday.
(taken from CNN.com September 30th 1999)"
There was the classic case here in Canada of the Gimli Glider in July of
1983 where an Air Canada Boeing 767 completely ran out of fuel at 41,000 ft
(12,500m) altitude halfway through its flight from Montreal to Edmonton. The
crew was able to glide the aircraft safely to an emergency landing at Gimli
Industrial Park Airport, a former airbase at Gimli, Manitoba. The subsequent
investigation revealed corporate failures and a chain of minor human errors
which combined to defeat built-in safeguards - basically the fuel loading
was miscalculated through misunderstanding of the recently adopted metric
system which replaced the Imperial system. A few people (10 out of the 69
on board) were injured, but no-one was killed.
Malvary in Ottawa(which is no-where near Gimli), Canada where it is -18c
with a wind chill of -25c this morning. It is supposed to snow, again,
later.
There are lots of pics if anyone is interested
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