Some BP employee predicted the BP catastrophe. Some operative predicted the September 11th attacks. In hindsight, what were the higher ups thinking?
The problem is, many such predictions were made by many different people. Some have come to pass, some have not, some never will. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff without benefit of hindsight? With great difficulty. Think about the simple case of every day life. Do you see every Tom, Dick, and Harry making perfect decisions based on incomplete information?
“BP” ?
British Petrol. The Alaskan pipeline catastrophe.
It’s easier for a group like NASA to analyze situations like this. There have been just over 110 shuttle launches with 2 failures. Both failures were something that people had been noticing as a potential problem for a while, but that several mission survived with similar problems prior to the failures. The Challenger launch was nearly cancelled because the engineers really thought it was going to blow up, but they were talked out of it. People were speculating on Columbia having been damaged during launch, although I don’t think anyone thought it was bad enough to worry about. The Challenger and Columbia reports both provide rather detailed studies of how many missions had warnings prior to the ones that failed and why the warnings were ignored. NASA has the advantage that there are a known number of shuttle launches. Nobody knows how many terrorist attacks have been planned and most people have no idea how many warnings the government gets about potential terrorist strikes. Similarly, few people have any idea how many miles of pipelines are considered likely to fail. The Columbia report is easy to find on the internet if you want to read about it. It has a summary of most the relevant information from the Challenger report.