NTSB: Co-pilot of Virgin Galactic spaceship unlocked braking system early

The premature unlocking of SpaceShipTwo’s hinged tail triggered a midair breakup of the ship during its fourth powered test flight on October 31 over California’s Mojave Desert, the National Transportation Safety Board has determined.

Pilot error has been blamed for a failed flight of Virgin Galactic’s historic SpaceShipTwo, which crashed into the Mojave desert 10 months ago. An earlier accident involving a SpaceShipTwo rocket system claimed the lives of three Scaled Composite employees in 2007.

“Humans will screw up anything if you give them enough opportunity”, Robert Sumwalt, a safety board member and former commercial airline pilot, said at a Tuesday meeting to determine the cause of the crash.

“It’s important to anticipate the errors and design a error tolerant system”.

The brash promises of Richard Branson’s space tourism company Virgin Galactic met reality in the plain confines of a bureaucratic committee room in Washington DC. From there, the rocket-powered craft was to climb to 68 miles (109 kilometers), enabling passengers paying $250,000 to experience weightlessness and view the curvature of the earth. The wing-feathering system shouldn’t have moved until a second lever was pulled – but because it was unlocked while the craft was still accelerating at transonic speeds through the atmosphere, extreme aerodynamic loads forced it to spring open at the wrong time.

In documents submitted to the NTSB, Virgin Galactic said the next SpaceShipTwo will be equipped with an “automatic mechanical inhibit” that will keep the braking system from being unlocked or locked during safety-critical phases of a flight.

Scaled Composites’ founder Burt Rutan, who designed the first privately funded vehicle to reach space, famously eschewed computerized control.

The FAA also lacked insight into the potentially fatal consequences of unlocking the tail section early and renewed Scaled’s experimental flight permit without checking that previously approved waivers, including human factors issues, had been addressed, which they hadn’t, the NTSB said.

“Scaled did not consider that a pilot would induce that kind of failure”, lead investigator Lorenda Ward said during the hearing, monitored via webcast.

Hart said he hoped the investigation will prevent such an accident from happening again. “We make safety recommendations, which if acted upon can help prevent recurrences”.