SAFETY
BY GORDON DUPONT
Ever wonder why Safety seems to get such a bad rap?
It is a very rare person who says, “I’m so excited to hear that we are holding a Safety meeting tonight!” Safety has the reputation for being boring, and besides — who needs it? No one does, or at least until one day the lack of knowledge bites you with a vengeance. It was not that long ago that the
odd fatality was just the price of doing business and Safety was just “common sense.” Safety training in those “good ol’ days,” was just two words I heard often — BE CAREFUL! If you slipped and fell because someone had left a patch of spilled oil on the floor, after expressing a few choice words (usually aimed at yourself), you picked yourself up and limped away hoping that no one had seen you being careless for not spotting the oil. I have more than a passing
interest in the following story as I helped my young son at the time restore a Ford Pinto and painted it a bright red color of his choice. Less than a month later, a car
crossed into his lane and thanks to seat belts he was not hurt. Had that collision occurred on the rear, there is a good chance I would no longer
have a son. No amount of money can ever compensate for the loss of your only son and I have never owned a Ford since. The late Lee Iacocca was
reported to be fond of saying, “Safety doesn’t sell.” The Ford Pinto, also known as “Lee’s car,” was prone to catch fire at low speed rear end crashes. Even at low speed the gas tank would be pushed forward into four protruding bolts and rupture. A fix as cheap as $5.08 per car by putting a plastic cover over the bolts was rejected as a now famous cost benefit analysis memo indicated that modifying all the cars would cost $137 million while payout for 180 burn deaths would only cost $12.5 million. How wrong they would be as they: a) had not
factored in the many vocal burn survivors as well as b) the negative publicity that would follow. One fatal accident alone resulted in punitive damages of $125 million. While that was later reduced, the Department of Transport ordered a recall of 1.5 million Pintos to be modified to prevent fatal rear end collisions. As a result of all of the negative publicity, (even with the fix), the Pinto was doomed, and production ceased. This, or perhaps Ralph Nader’s book “Unsafe at any Speed,” was likely the turning point for car Safety, because from then on, Safety did sell. My pick-up has 8 airbags in it and I suspect if they ever all went off the vehicle would be a write off just for the cost of replacing them.
12
HelicopterMaintenanceMagazine.com August | September 2019
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44