B-29 Tragedy.

[Flanker35M]

S!

Not gonna say anything about the persons involved in the B29 incident. But as it was they worked in harsh and primitive conditions. This alone enforces one rule, to be extra careful! It is different to maintain/repair a plane in the hangar than out there in the snow. People tend to make shortcuts to get into warm, tiredness makes your concentration slip etc. So here they put in an APU, but not well enough, the fittings were makeshift and hurried it seems. Now it escalated when they taxied at high speed causing jolts to the already flimsy installation. Fuel tank broke loose, spilled on APU that was running STILL even pre-flight was done..So actually the slogan "Small errors cause big problems" is very true..Here it just escalated and caused loss of a plane and a life.

In projects like these hurry and too much eagerness is your enemy and backfires for sure. A leader of this kind of project should know and make assessments of the risk and put extra attention to the work, to be done even more carefull than usual, to avoid mistakes and minimize risks to both personnel and equipment.