airlifting & marriage

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 this morning i read trp's "togetherness".

 [- see aerospace safety, 16 (december  1960), pp. 6-18; also available at   
 http://pages.whowhere.com/internet/f.vazquez/togetherness.html].

 it's a kind of pragmatically orientated empirical study in the sociology of 
 risk. 

 [- in case you're interested in that theme, you may check out charles perrow's 
 "normal accidents. living with high-risk technologies" (ny 1984: basic books) 
 or wolfgang bonß' "vom risiko. unsicherheit und ungewißheit in der moderne"  
 (hamburg 1995: hamburger edition)]. 

 here come some outtakes from pynchon's article:

 "two birds per airlift are onloaded by boeing people and offloaded by air force 
 people; in between is an airborne  m a t s  c-124. one loading operation is a 
 mirror-image of the other, and similar accidents can happen at both places. 
 (...) as this article goes to press, the safety record of bomarc airlifts can 
 be summed up in four words: so far, so good. you may recall, however, the 
 optimist who jumped off the top of a new york office building. he was heard to 
 yell the same thing as he passed the 20th floor: so far, so good. (...) good 
 safety practices are, we know, redundant. just as there are two or three 
 different ways to trigger an ejection seat, so there are extra, redundant, 
 'insurance' features associated with airlifting the im-99a. (...) there have 
 also been cases where survival was strictly a matter of luck. (...) the loading 
 trailers here at seattle - refered to, for some obscure reason, as 'tomato' 
 dollies - are smaller and lighter than those in use at the other end. this 
 makes for speed and safety in loading, since less strain is put on the loading 
 gear. (...) we are not saying that the seattle end of the airlift is 
 ultra-safe, and can do no wrong, while the other end is a horde of 
 accident-prones. the boeing crew doesn't wear safety shoes. the bases don't 
 have the three-light system. so who is safer than who? (...) another thing both 
 ends must realize is that loading crews get used to working together. m a t s  
 likes to rotate loadmasters on these airlifts, to spread the experience around. 
 but in places with a low turnover rate, missile stevedoring would be performed 
 by a more or less integrated team, who knew each others' idiosyncrasies, who  
 had evolved certain private hand or verbal signals valid only for the team 
 itself. up to a point nothing is wrong with this approach. m a t s  has been in 
 business since 1948, and aiflifts have been going on nearly as far back as the 
 wright brothers. during that strech, a lot of knowledge has been accumulated. 
 the rules on missile transportation - safety and otherwise - are based solidly 
 on common sense, and if the same crew has been working together over a period 
 of time, such 'in-group' communication can speed things up. but now, take for 
 instance the crewman who nearly got squashed between two missiles. suppose the 
 man signalled his plight to the anchor vehicle had started dancing around, 
 waving and yelling. suppose the winch operator had been a new man, not 
 thoroughly briefed on signals. to him, such apparently random signalling could 
 have meant 'go faster', 'the trailer just ran over my foot', 'the general is 
 coming,' or just about anything. if he had thought to himself, 'maybe he means 
 i should take in more', and thereupon started reeling in cable fast and 
 furiously, the im-99a airlift would have chalked up its first fatality. the 
 moral is simply that everybody engaged in the operation should be told 
 beforehand what each signal means and the information checked and double  
 checked before on or offloading ever begins. / t h e s e   a r e   
 p r o b a b l y   t h e    t w o   m a j o r   p r o b l e m s: slope of the 
 ramp and positive communication. (...) at the risk of belaboring the obvious, 
 it would seem that difference between getting killed and living to a ripe old 
 age ought, by every rule of common sense, to be everybody's problem. (...) 
 there has never been a tragedy on any bomarc airlift. yet." 

 but my favourite sentence of this text is the first one that shows the reader  
 that a real author is speaking:

 "airlifting the im-99a missile, like marriage, demands a certain amount of 
 'togetherness' between air force and contractor."

 would be interesting to read something about, well, the motif of marriage in 
 the writings of thomas pynchon ...

kai