Engineering ethics: How to be ethical and survive: Some engineering societies offer aid in a conflict, but competence and confidence can help mitigate trauma and duress

Engineers sometimes find that attempts to practice their profession ethically can lead to conflicts with their managers. Where such conflicts have involved the public safety, dramatic confrontations have resulted. Here are well-known examples: • In 1972 in San Francisco, a Bay Area Rapid Transit train overran a station and plowed into a sandpile. Immediately questions were raised publicly about the safety of the new system's automatic features. The accident was traced to a crystal oscillator in an operating subsystem that had transmitted the wrong speed to the train. Costly corrective retrofitting and a backup system were ordered, but critics said there were design flaws that should have been caught before the railroad line was built. • In 1974a Turkish Airlines DC-10 crashed nine minutes after takeoff from Paris when the jet's rear cargo door flew off at 13 000 feet. The sudden decompression crushed the cabin floor and the plane's hydraulic steering apparatus. In all, 346 persons died. Again, a public controversy erupted, with critics charging that the builders of the craft and even the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration knew that the door design was defective. The latching mechanism and the omission of floor venting were problems that could have been corrected at low cost when recognized during the design phase. The cost rose steeply as designs were converted to production processes and then to airplanes.