Ammar Barkat
Research Paper
CS-487
Whenever a major engineering task is attempted, the idea of it always has the people that hear about shocked in awe. It is interesting because every time since the beginning of human kind, the response is the same, which is, this is going to be the next big thing that will put us into the future. A fact that is largely overlooked when it comes to these huge engineering tasks is whether or not the idea will actually work. This was the case back in 1995 with the Denver International Airport, fully automatic baggage claim system. It was a great idea on paper, but when it came time to build it, they realized that they should have put a lot more thought into it. When Obamacare launched in October of 2013, it was the same
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In a system this complicated, the testing should not be left until the end, if they had done testing after each component was built, they would have quickly figured out that, some corners were too sharp, and some inclines were to steep, and the software did not have fail safe systems fully implemented to prevent a disaster.
Ultimately they paid the price, as the system was scrapped completely in 2005, because they main backer, United Airlines, refused to pay $1 million every month for a system that didn’t even do its job. It is one of the largest engineering fails, and the flaws in the end were so big, that it was cheaper to just scrap the system instead of trying to re engineer it to work as it should, and it all comes down to listening to the people that tell you that it is not a smart idea, with tons of evidence, this disaster could have been avoided, but they decided to pursue a very difficult task with a low success rate, and they failed, and there is a lot about modern engineering that can be learnt from