Why Technical Writing Is Important

One problem with a well-written document is that the quality becomes invisible. It is like the well-placed stop sign at a busy four-way intersection: you cannot easily measure the number of accidents it has prevented.

  Here are 3 aerospace stories that may help illustrate what can go wrong when the documentation is incomplete or not readily accessible.  You do not have to be an aerospace engineer to realize the importance.

  In the late 1970s, McDonnell-Douglas introduced the state-of-the-art DC-10 airliner. In many innovations in its design, they required special maintenance. At the time, it was a common maintenance practice to use a forklift during aircraft engine changes: raise the forks to take the weight of the engine of the wing, unfasten and then lower the engine. McDonnell Douglas’ maintenance manual said to use an expensive, custom-made engine stand system for engine changes.

It never said why.

  American Airlines chose to forego the maintenance stand. What AA did not know was that because of the new way of engine mounting on the DC-10, using a forklift would induce cracks in the wing. On May 25, 1979, wing cracks caused an engine to fall off AA flight 191 shortly after takeoff from O’Hare airport. Over 272 people were killed making it the deadliest airline accident on US soil. It likely could have been prevented with a simple, standard safety admonition explaining why the maintenance stand was required.

  In November 2001, AA flight 587 took off from JFK airport. The Airbus A300 took off not far behind a Boeing 747, ending up in the 747’s wake. The A300 first officer responded with what is standard procedure in these situations: full throttle and kick the pedals to both extremes until the rudder gets a bite of the airflow and control returns.

  Unfortunately, that procedure was developed in airplanes that have metal stabilizers. The A300 has a composite vertical stabilizer. The first officer’s actions caused the vertical stabilizer to rip from the fuselage. The airplane crashed. Loss of life was 265, making it the second deadliest air crash on US soil.

  The A300 is made in France; investigation showed that the original French version of the pilot’s manual contained a safety admonition against using the full throttle and rudder method of recovery. For reasons not entirely clear, this admonition did not appear in the English translation of the manual.

  Finally, on June 1, 2009, Air France flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean with a loss of 228 lives, the deadliest crash in Air France’s history. Although an investigation into the loss of the Airbus A330 was still underway, the data seems to point to the cockpit crew’s failure to use relatively standard procedures (push the nose down, then increase power) to recover from an aerodynamic stall. Preliminary reports indicate that this information is not in the A330 pilot’s manual. One could argue that the flight crew was unlikely to have pulled out the manual during the in-flight crisis, also keep in mind that it's a standard requirement for pilots to read the whole flight manual on a regular schedule. Had the stall recovery procedure been present, it is possible it would have been reinforced in the flight crew’s minds by re-reading.

  In all three examples, it’s possible that better documentation could have prevented the crashes, saving over 600 lives and preventing the loss of nearly $1 billion in aircraft.

  All the relevant aircraft manuals appear fine on the surface and may appear adequate on reading through, but a skilled technical communicator would have argued for the inclusion of safety information in all cases. Perhaps an on-line document would have been sufficient, being that it would have been reachable immediately and not subject to regular print-bound updates, It is not always enough to tell the user what to do, sometimes you have to tell the user WHY things need to be done a particular way (the maintenance stand), or not done (the turbulence correction), or even that then need to be done (stall recovery).

  Do non-writers see the value in good writing? Tell them these stories, and for extra emphasis tell the stories shortly before they take a trip on an airplane.

   It just may make an impression.