Previous media releases

In the wake of last week's drama on the Hudson River it is worth reflecting on the dramatic tests that regulators use to measure the 'bird-resilience' of modern jet engines.

How do we know if an engine would safely swallow a bird? And what can the answer to this question teach us about our relationships with the technologies we depend on. John Downer comments in his article 'Epistemological Chicken: What do we learn form aircraft 'bird-ingestion' tests?'.

John Downer is a Research Officer at the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) at the London School of Economics. He is author of "When the Chick Hits the Fan: Representativeness and Reproducibility in Technological Testing." in Social Studies of Science. Vol. 31 No.1 Feb. 2007 pp.7-26

Contact: Pranav Bihari, CARR, at 020 7849 4635 or risk@lse.ac.uk

From pacemakers to power-plants, we are surrounded by technologies that cannot be allowed to fail. For this reason, we must know the reliability of such technologies before we approve them. The high stakes demand high certainty, yet such knowledge is often more ambiguous than we are led to believe.

Downer's paper 'When Failure is an Option: Redundancy, reliability and regulation in complex technical systems' explores our ability to understand complex machines by focusing on the history and logic of 'redundancy' in mechanical engineering. Using civil aircraft as a case study, it shows how reliability assessments of potentially hazardous technologies are built on redundancy, and explains why that foundation is frailer than it appears.

John Downer is a Research Officer at the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) at the London School of Economics. He is author of "When the Chick Hits the Fan: Representativeness and Reproducibility in Technological Testing." in Social Studies of Science. Vol. 31 No.1 Feb. 2007 pp.7-26