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“’Just culture’ as a term emerged from air traffic control in the late 1990s, as concern was mounting that air traffic controllers were unfairly cited or prosecuted for incidents that happened to them while they were on the job,” Sidney Dekker, a professor, writer, and director of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia, explains to Quartz in an email. Eurocontrol, the intergovernmental organization that focuses on the safety of airspace across Europe, has “adopted a harmonized ‘just culture’ that it encourages all member countries and others to apply to their air traffic control organizations.” […] One tragic example of what can happen when companies don’t create a culture where employees feel empowered to raise questions or admit mistakes came to light in 2014, when an investigation into a faulty ignition switch that caused more than 100 deaths at GM Motors revealed a toxic culture of denying errors and deflecting blame within the firm. The problem was later attributed to one engineer who had not disclosed an obvious issue with the flawed switch, but many employees spoke of extreme pressure to put costs and delivery times before all other considerations, and to hide large and small concerns.
(via JG)(tags: just-culture atc air-traffic-control management post-mortems outages reliability air-canada disasters accidents learning psychological-safety work)
Dark forces, Brexit and Irexit
The EU have made it clear, as they have to, that there will be no frictionless borders between the union and the UK. Brexit will be dislocative. As smaller irish companies start to go to the wall post Brexit expect the calls for “something to be done” to start to include Irexit [an Irish exit from the EU a la Brexit]. But this way madness lies. […] we export more in education services than in beverages ; we exportthree times or more manufactured goods than food; we export six times more in chemicals and related; value added by industry or by distribution and transport is more than 10 times that of agriculture. Seeking Irexit on the basis that it would be good for agribusiness is seeking to amputate a hand for a broken finger.
(tags: agribusiness ireland irexit brexit economics eu politics)
APOLLO 13 EARTH ORBITAL CHART | Artsy
Some nice catalogue details around this Apollo 13 AEO:
Apollo Earth Orbit Chart (AEO), Apollo Mission 13 for April 1970 Launch Date. March 3, 1970. Color Earth map, first edition. 13 by 42 inches. From the Catalogue: SIGNED and INSCRIBED: “JAMES LOVELL, Apollo 13 CDR and FRED HAISE, Apollo 13 LMP.” Additionally INSCRIBED by HAISE with mission events: “Launch at 2:13 pm EST, April 11, 1970” and “Splash – April 17, 1970.” He has marked the splashdown area with an “X.” Circular plots in black represent the ground station communication coverage areas with the red circle being the tracking ship Vanguard in the Atlantic Ocean. Orbital paths show the full launch range azimuths of 72 to 108 degrees. The first orbit is plotted in light blue with the second orbit in dark blue. The planned TLI (TransLunar Injection) burn occurred on time during the mission and is plotted with a red dashed line. The point above the Earth as Apollo 13 headed toward the Moon is shown with a brown line and continues for 24 hours of mission elapsed time. This line moves over the Pacific Ocean and into the continental United States. Then it moves backwards (relative to the Earth’s rotation) over the Pacific Ocean and ends near the west coast of Africa. The Service Module explosion occurred some 32 hours after end point of the TLI brown line tracking plot.
(tags: aeo apollo history spaceflight collectibles antiques james-lovell fred-haise 1970 apollo-13 charts)