Читать книгу Germany's Freefall - Hermann Dr. Rochholz - Страница 12

You are constantly being confronted with new rules and guidelines. Technicians and engineers have “standards” for this. This is currently getting out of hand. Standards and guidelines aren’t the same in every country since the conditions aren’t the same. The purpose of standards is safety. Road traffic regulations are also written for safety’s sake.

In order to draft standards and guidelines, experts convene in order to discuss these. The difficulty is that as these experts try to prevent accidents, rules must be formulated in such a way that they don’t lead to an incapacity to act. This is even stated in the standards. Expert knowledge is therefore necessary to draft them. By the way, standards must always be adapted to the “state of the art”.

Not every innovative technology is beneficial everywhere. For example, aeronautical engineering is “conservative”, and innovations find their way into the market only very slowly. The failure of a single component can mean hundreds of deaths. That’s why computer-only control of an aircraft is prohibited (every processor is faulty) and why it’s mandatory to install important sensors twice (called redundancy). Electric airplanes designed for passenger transport are difficult to make because each battery must be monitored individually, since an airplane will crash in case a battery catches fire. Boeing can tell you a thing or two about this after they installed new types of batteries solely to power their instruments, and these had started to burn. The planes were “grounded”, just like the Boeing 737Max today. Even a Tesla car had posed insurmountable problems in Austria for several weeks because it wasn’t possible to transport the burnt-out vehicle wreckage. Electric cars had been approved, but nobody had considered the fact that this kind of a car could catch fire as well. Incidentally, 50 years ago, the German “NSU Prinz” automobile was dubbed “a lighter on wheels”. The registration authorities do know that cars can burn.

It took Airbus a long time to obtain the approval for components that weren’t made of aluminum but of fiber-reinforced plastics. Such a thing wasn’t permitted at the time, but was already standard in glider construction. Many tests proved that the components would be able to withstand the imposed loads. Then certification was assured and everything seemed fine. One was astonished to find that these airplanes were becoming heavier and heavier. The reason was that plastics soak up a certain amount of water (~1%), demonstrating that even the experts sometimes fail to consider the little things like this. In this case, it was of no critical importance, but in an airplane with a structural weight of 30 t, 1% also means missing a payload of 300 kg.

All in all, these rules and laws exist to make life as free as possible from any danger. However, these must be written in such a way that the limits are not too stringent in order for any action to be possible at all.

Furthermore, laws mustn’t conflict. For example, measles vaccination has become mandatory in schools. However, if a student refuses to get vaccinated then this means a conflict with Germany’s law of compulsory education.