Posted on 01/30/2007 8:07:27 PM PST by KevinDavis
Sometime very early in the Columbia accident investigation, Admiral Hal Gehman, the chairman of the investigation board, reportedly held up a copy of the Challenger accident investigation report. It was one of the first things he read after being named to lead the investigation. “This is not the kind of report we are going to write,” he told the staff.
Late in the investigation I had a conversation with an Air Force officer who was working on the crew mortality part of the investigation. The officer told me how the small group working on that issue had taken a completely different approach than the Challenger investigation. The Challenger report had included no information on crew mortality. That information did not leak out until a year or so later, leading to charges of a coverup at NASA. The Columbia investigators were doing it differently. They had run a more formal crew mortality investigation, and had written a section of the final report on the subject. He explained that when the Air Force lost an aircraft, the cause of mortality was included in the report because it was vital for improving safety. If an ejection seat or other safety device failed to save a crewman’s life, people needed to know that so it could be fixed. The same was true for the astronauts.
(Excerpt) Read more at thespacereview.com ...
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