ChemE Stewart <[email protected]> wrote: Incomplete theory, less than optimum results... > > . . . >
> Everything went well until that fateful day in September that began with a > cheering crowd of 2,000 and ended with pilot Orville Wright severely > injured and passenger Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge dead. > That had nothing to do with theory, or an engineering model. It was not caused by lack of flying skill. It was caused by a mechanical problem with the propeller. Blaming that on theory would be like blaming the fatal accident at SRI in 1992 on electrochemical theory or cold fusion. The cause was prosaic. Multiple fail-safe devices in a high pressure call all failed at once, in a terrible coincidence. - Jed
