June 09 blog

I was just 20 when I first got to work in a power station. I learned a lot then – not just about the technical side, but also about human nature. One example was when I was sent out with a crew whose job it was to change the oil in some of the big transformers. These were housed in little brick-built buildings and the job itself was fairly straightforward: bring in a bowser of oil, couple it to the transformer, empty out the old oil and pump in the new. The pumping operation was the most labour-intensive, since we used hand-operated pumps. Nevertheless, the job was soon done, and then the crew all sat down, pulled out cigarettes and/or sandwiches and chatted happily.

Being young and naïve I asked one of the old hands how this could be justified. We could have done the job within minutes and then moved on to the next, thereby completing the job very quickly. ‘Listen lad,’ a grizzled old boy said. ‘We’re given two hours for this job. If we did it in less time – and I’ll give you that we could – the management would cut the time allowed. If that went on all over the station we’d have people hanging round doing nothing. Then they’d be laid off and claiming benefits. As it is, we’re in full employment – so it’s better for us and for the country to work like this.’

There was a strange sort of logic to this then, and there probably would be some now, but the cost had to be paid somehow and in those days it came from the Central Electricity Authority. In a way, we were doing then what senior board members, management consultants and so on, do these days. There were lots of us then, getting a little money for doing a job, whereas we now have a smaller number of hangers-on, all earning fortunes.

The devil is in the detail. Just look at what happens today: with very few exceptions, today’s senior managers are not engineers and know very little about engineering. Their duty is to maximise profits and if this means cutting out jobs at the lower levels, then it becomes so. The fact remains: the basic engineering tasks still need to be done. But in the minds of the accountants they can be farmed out to sub-contractors as and when necessary.

The end result? Well, look at what happened in an industry that has gone through a similar process – Water. When the main sewer in our village got blocked last winter, a sub-contract crew was called out to clear it. They did this, signed off the job as being complete, went back to base and in time collected their money. But they hadn’t looked at the problem and searched for a reason why it occurred. Result? It’s just happened again. The crew turned up, cleared the blockage and moved on. And so on, and so on. With a full-time maintenance department working for the water company that would have been far less likely. They would have investigated the problem thoroughly and it would have been resolved – permanently.

In the long term this sort of thing costs much more, and the inconvenience and possible damage to public health would have been much less.

Don’t get me wrong: I have very little complaint against my internet service provider, British Telecom, but I am currently in a dilemma that reminds me of my plea for Chairmen and CEOs of big companies to occasionally get down to see the problems their customers can experience.

It all began when I asked BT to remove my BT Vision subscription because I rarely bought films and when I did, the low speed of my broadband connection made them all jerky and intermittent. The helpful chap who dealt with this request agreed to do it but commented that, as I rarely used anything like my normal download limit, I could benefit from moving to a cheaper plan. He assured me that the only difference between the service I had been enjoying and the new one would be the reduction in the download limit.

Then, as he was about to hang up, he added, ‘Thank you, sir. Your new Home Hub should arrive within the next two days.’

‘I know, sir,’ he sighed. ‘But the Hub’s included in the package, and I can’t separate it out. Anyway, it’s more powerful than the older version, so you’ll get better speed.’ (For the geeks among you, what I think he meant is that it’s an IEEE 802.11n hub, whereas its predecessor was 802.11g.)

After commenting on what he might have thought this sort of thing was doing to the planet I agreed and, sure enough, within a couple of days the new hub arrived.

I’ll skip the bit about the Hub being faulty and the delay in a replacement being sent because they’d run out of Jiffybags. In the end the Hub did work, and it does really seem to be better than the old one. My main point is that, after getting it going, I foolishly decided to make use of the Hub Phone that came with it.

The Hub Phone uses a broadband connection to make ordinary telephone calls. I’d rarely used the old one, but I felt that at times a second phone might handy, so I set about getting it going.

To cut a very long story short, this proved to be very difficult to do indeed. The key to the problem is that when I first set up my broadband connection I had used a separate line. I just have one line now for everything.

The difficulty was that the hub phone had been ‘activated’ on the old line. ‘Simples!’ you say. ‘Tch! All that’s needed is to activate it on the new one.’ Perhaps, but this simple fact seems to elude the helpful people at BT, and that’s how I’m floundering around inside an octopus. Having been swallowed by it, I tried to explore along one tentacle to try and find a way out. You know the sort of thing – ‘Press 1 for this, 2 for that’ then ‘You now have four options …’. Several of these chains finished up at dead ends, at which point I’d try to explore another tentacle. (One even told me to ring the number where I’d started and then ended with a curt Anne-Robinson-type ‘Goodbye!’) An octopus has only got eight tentacles; BT seems to have dozens – either that or I’d forgotten where I started and spent hours crawling along inside a few of them several times.

And it was no better when I tried their Website. At one point I got a message saying ‘Your Hub Phone has already been activated.’ I KNOW! What I want is to have it activated on my present line!

June 9, 2009: ‘Elf and safety again

It’s important that people who are involved with planning and doing things should take care that accidents don’t happen. Well, of course accidents will happen – nobody can prevent them – but if reasonable steps are taken, the consequences can be minimised. The big question is, what is reasonable?

I do voluntary work for a couple of organizations and get involved with this issue for both of them. One, a highly professional and well-organised charity, issues clear guidelines and requires us to complete detailed ‘Risk Assessments’ for any activity that will involve members of the public – fairs, competitions and so on. The other issues no such guidelines and although Risk Assessments are advised, we have no rules for compiling these.

So, what is a Risk Assessment? It’s a process by which all activities are looked atand the possibilities of injury or damage are evaluated. For example, if a gazebo is used making sure that people don’t trip over guy ropes, that it can’t blow away or catch fire and so on. (We also have to look at the risk of likely lads making off with the cashbox!) Numbers are allocated to each risk and then measures are worked out to reduce them. At the end, the risk is re-appraised and if the new numbers are low the risk can be tolerated. On a scale of 0-10 anything under 3 is judged acceptable. This is because you can never have zero risk; however careful you are, some idiot is bound to do something stupid and completely unpredictable.

What’s the point? Well, it makes us look at things and do our best to make them safe. The problem is that people forget, or if given a printed list that looks the same as last year’s they skip over the details.

The two organizations I mentioned above have very different approaches to safety. The ultimate aim is safety, but one expects us to be able to produce a bit of paper showing that we have thought about it, the other just urges us to consider safety. Until an accident happens it doesn’t really matter which approach we adopt. But if something does go wrong, the one that has nothing to show that they evaluated the risk is likely to be in deep trouble.

So, all in all, I am in favour of formal risk-assessment procedures – but I do seriously object when they cross over the boundary of good sense.

I was once involved with risk-assessing a hazardous industrial plant. Everybody had been meticulous is safety issues and the Risk Assessment came out very well indeed. The problem was that, in their attempts to eliminate human error, the designers had created a plant that virtually ran itself. No people were required to attend while it ran, and human attention was needed merely to carry our routine maintenance – and that’s where the good-sense boundary was crossed.
While the plant was under running automatic control, nobody could get hurt – because nobody was there. The risks to life appeared when people were sent there. It turned out that these risks were unexpectedly large, not because of any inherent danger in the plant, but because the visits involved travelling there and back on a motorway. In fact, this was the highest risk – and the consultant’s advice was that the plant should be allowed to run with no routine maintenance.
That's when I backed away from that one!

June 8, 2009: The tragic loss of Air France flight A447

A few days ago I referred to the sudden disappearance of the Air France A330 aircraft. At that time very little information was available but now we know a bit more. As my regular readers will know, in spite of being an electronic engineer by profession I am suspicious of certain systems. My antennae rise when I suspect that a design has been over-reliant on computers and pushed ahead by strong commercial pressures. (I’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt as they say.) In my novel Far Point, a computer controlling a large power station takes over unexpectedly and causes a fatal accident. That tale was based on a real episode.

With my background, whenever I hear of an incident that could possibly be the result of computer failure, I wonder what could have caused it, and what the effects would have been. The A330 is a ‘fly-by-wire’ aircraft, which means that the pilot’s (or autopilot’s) commands are fed to computers which send signals to the engines and the control surfaces. This leads to very flexible and low-weight systems. Safety and reliability are achieved by using triple or quadrupled computers, where every action is voted upon before action is taken.

So, could a problem simultaneously affect all those computers? Without knowing the details of the design, I can’t be sure. But then I hunt around to see if other incidents have occurred involving this type of aircraft, which could have been caused by a computer malfunction.

Guess what? In 2008, a Qantas A330 flying from Singapore to Perth suffered a rapid loss of height over Western Australia. Two sudden pitch-down manoeuvres occurred, without any command have been given by the pilots. In the resulting steep dive, many passengers and crew members were injured, some seriously. Fortunately, the aircraft was able to land safely at an Australian airfield. A subsequent enquiry identified the likely cause as having been the failure of a gadget called an Air Data Inertial Reference Unit (ADIRU). This sent incorrect signals to all three flight computers and resulted in false warnings been given to the flight-deck crew, and several malfunction warnings being transmitted by the Electronic Centralised Aircraft Monitoring system.

A year earlier, a similar malfunction had affected an A330 flying to Perth from Hong Kong. Five months after that another A330 experienced a malfunction in its ADIRU. A couple of months after that an A330 flying from Perth to Singapore suffered a very similar incident at almost the same spot .... which happened to be near a nearby Naval communications station.

Within the past few days, Air France have issued warnings and taken action to deal with possible faults with ‘speed sensors’ on A330s. We are also told of a severe electrical storm in the vicinity of the Air France flight.

Of course, it’s too early to say yet, but is there a possibility that an external electrical/electronic event was the cause of these incidents – in one case interference from the communications station, in the other from a nearby thunderstorm?

The worrying thought is that, if the earlier A330 incidents were indeed caused by this type of malfunction, why has Airbus Industrie waited for yet another event to occur before taking action?

June 7, 2009: Look where we would be if engineers hadn’t rebelled

Over my lifetime I have seen a few near-disasters where politicians, ill-informed and under intense pressure from clever people in other countries, nearly forced the UK into avenues which would have been disastrous.

One of these was in the field of television. Standards for colour TV were developed in several countries at more or less the same time (the late 50s or early 60s). There were three main competitors then: the North American NTSC system (National Television Standard Committee), the German PAL system (Phase Alternation Lines) and the French SECAM system (Séquentiel couleur à mémoire). Basically NTSC was the first and because of that it had several weaknesses compared with the later developments. Also, it had been based on US standards where, because the mains frequency is 60 Hz (cycles per second), it had a 60 HZ refresh rate. It was also designed for TV pictures made up of 525 lines, which was much fewer than those in Europe and therefore offered poorer definition. The other competitors were based on a 50 Hz mains frequency, which matched our own, and on a 625-line picture.

Anybody who has viewed TV in the USA will have scarcely failed to notice the poor picture quality there due to the weaknesses of NTSC (nicknamed Never Twice the Same Colour).

Our politicians were put under pressure from the Americans to adopt their standard, which would have led to us being completely out of step with the rest of the world, being based on an American system massaged to our 50Hz mains system, and we would have been saddled with poor-quality TV pictures. Fortunately, a rebellion by engineers forced sanity onto Westminster, and we plumped for PAL.

The second example is in nuclear power. Again, in the 60s, ill-informed MPs were being pressurized by canny overseas fellow-thinkers to adopt a design of nuclear reactor which was claimed to be vastly superior to anything we ourselves had developed. Tony Benn became an advocate for the RBMK reactor designed by his friends in the USSR and again it was only when strong voices were raised from the engineering community that we drew back. The RBMK reactor was the design that exploded at Chernobyl!

Incidentally, in both these cases it is interesting to see how our own technical role was a secondary one. In both cases we adopted foreign designs, and this led to major losses of our in-house expertise: today there are no British manufacturers of TVs left, and the next generation of nuclear power stations will use foreign designs, foreign engineers and imported parts.

June 5, 2009: The biter bit!

Yesterday we saw a very interesting reply from the BBC Trust when somebody tried to find out what top presenters are being paid: “Sorry, no,” they said. “That would be a breach of the Data Protection Act!”

So the hyenas that bring down MPs over their expenses have the right to have a curtain drawn over their own benefits from our licence fees.

It’s our money, folks! Surely we have just as much right to know how deeply John Humphrys guzzles from the gravy-train as he has to bray over how much politicians get reimbursed for duck-houses and moats?

I don’t suppose the Trust wants to let us know about presenters’ expenses either!

June 4, 2009: What is it with the Brits? (Reloaded)

The British have an unfailing penchant for taking a basically good, sensible idea and turning it into a hideous nightmare. I’ve banged on before about Health and Safety. We all see the need for rules when it comes to safety, but why oh why do we love going over the top? Health and Safety zealots come down hard on people organising events, sometimes causing them to be cancelled. Yet recently the head of the Health and Safety Executive said that people often misunderstood and over-applied sensible rules. And then there’s the little sagas about smoke detectors and telephone sockets…

But now we have a lulu! It would seem logical, wouldn't it, to provide full information on a house to anybody wanting to buy it, but what a monster has appeared in the form of Home Information Packs, or HIPs! These are the packs of data that a prospective seller has to have prepared when a house goes on the market. The Energy Performance Certificate is a total joke. It involves a ‘surveyor’ visiting the house and assessing certain factors (such as loft insulation and double glazing). These are plugged into a computer program to produce the rating on a scale of A to G (such as you seen on refrigerators, freezers, washing machines etc.).

The assumptions made in the software are meaningless for older buildings. For example, no allowance is made for having a wood-burning stove for example, which should be regarded as a very "green" feature in any house. In addition, the insulating properties of walls are assessed on a quite arbitrary scale.

The frightening thing – apparently characteristic of us Brits – is that all sorts of individuals and organizations then jump on the bandwagon and make lots of money. With pretty rudimentary training and quite meaningless qualifications, they march up, demand a couple of hundred Quid and produce a load of gobbledegook simply in order to satisfy the rules.

June 3, 2009: How do they choose interviewers on the Today programme?

An interesting report this morning that the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) says we waste a lot of heat at our power stations. Doh! Everybody who has experience of the industry knows it, and we know how it happens, and we do know how to cut it down. The problem is the cost/benefit trade-off.

It’s too complex to go into in depth, but an important point needs to be understood: if we are going to use this waste heat, power stations will need to be built close to towns and industries. In some cases this has already been done, and people have benefitted from it. (That sad, iconic London landmark, Battersea power station used the technology decades ago and exported a lot of its ‘waste’ heat. The fact that it lies abandoned and unused shows that people didn’t want power stations near their city centres.) How will it go down if we announce that power stations are going to spring up everywhere? The Nimbys will be out in force!

I listened to Sarah Montague on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning as she scathingly asked the ICE spokesman, “But we don’t need power stations, do we?” If I’d been in the studio I wouldn’t have been able to resist saying, after a suitable pregnant pause, “When they interviewed you for your job, was crass stupidity a requirement?”

June 2, 2009: Another ‘plane crash.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of the people on the Airbus that seems to have crashed in the Atlantic yesterday. The thought is that a severe electrical storm may have somehow been responsible, which brought back memories for me.

There can’t be too many people around who have been in an aircraft hit by lightning, but I’m one – and I remember the event very well indeed. I had been sent in great haste to a nuclear submarine under commissioning at Barrow-in-Furness. (My sandwich at my desk had been interrupted by our Service Manager popping in to ask if I was free that afternoon to look at ‘a little problem’. An hour later I was on a chartered executive jet!)

Going into a vessel like that is another story, but it was on the return flight that my reading of the complimentary Financial Times was interrupted by a sudden lurch and I found myself looking towards the cockpit between the two halves of the newspaper which had split as my hands jerked apart. The pilot was looking back at me and shouting if I was all right.

I had seen a flash outside my window, and the lightning seemed to have hit half way along the wing, which wasn’t nearly as big as the huge thing that helps to hold a jumbo-jet up and so was uncomfortably close to me.

We were OK, but when we landed at Gatwick I strolled round the aircraft and examined the wing. There wasn’t a mark on it.

It made me think about the vulnerability of aircraft to electrical strikes. You can have all sorts of duplicated and triplicated systems, and all sorts of fail-safes, but when there’s a direct hit things can go very wrong indeed. A sudden, total loss of power will completely disable all communications, navigational aids and controls.

June 1, 2009: No job? Let’s see if we have an affordable house for you.

There was an item on Country File last night where they looked at the plight of people in rural areas who have no jobs. One enterprising lady was living in a horse-box! (Quite a nice one, actually with shower, toilet, kitchen etc., ….and a horse in a separate compartment at the other end.)

Representatives of the local authorities were wringing their hands and saying that there was a shortage of affordable housing for such people.

Affordable housing for people with no jobs? What does that achieve? I’d say it would help only preserve the administrators’ jobs for a few more years; but the cost will be the creation of a generation – or more – of no-hopers, living pointless, dreary lives in front of the TV, lounging around doing nothing. Providing a supply of affordable homes for people with no jobs is like holding a thumb on a burst water-pipe; it doesn’t actually fix the problem.

What we need is an administration that takes an honest look at these situations – which are repeated everywhere up and down and across the country – and to realise that the main need is to CREATE JOBS! Not ticky-tacky jobs in stores (though there is a place for those) but real jobs, ones that actually create wealth and offer real security for the future.