sferrin said:
TomS said:
Guy says "I called it" like he expected they were going to have failures. Makes me suspect they were trying something new in how they rigged the chutes and it didn't work very well.
Why on earth would they do that during a mass drop? (And why would they keep dropping them when they know the "new" method - if there was one- doesn't work?) Sounds more like yet another symptom of training budget cuts to me.
Any given heavy drop has a chance of at least one "streamer" or even two -- only after the second one is there any reason to think there's a systematic problem and it's not really confirmed until number three craters in. The time from first to last bad drop here is just over a minute. From the second to the third is just over 30 seconds. That's how long they had to figure out that they might have a systematic problem and abort the drops. That's too short a cycle time to realistically make the call.
Assuming I'm right (and it is only a guess), they would have tried it successfully in smaller tests first, and this might be the first time testing it out in a mass drop. In that case, there might be a training problem in translating a new technique from the testers to the full unit.
Or its one grade-A screwup who rigged those three vehicles and no one spotted his mistakes.