Wisdom Literature for 21st-century Engineers

The other day I received a copy of a book written by a retired engineering professor and academic administrator named Lyle Feisel.  Prof. Feisel has found plenty of good works to do in his retirement, one of which was to write a column for The Bent, the magazine of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society.  He has collected these columns in a book with the title Lyle's Laws:  Reflections on Ethics, Engineering, and Everything Else. University administrators as a group are not noted for their literary brilliance or scintillating wit, and I will admit I opened the book with some trepidation.  But even after I had read (and enjoyed) it, it took me a while to figure out what category of literature it was. 

It's not an ethics textbook, by any means.  There are no homework problems, and each of its forty or so chapters is only a few pages long, dealing with a separate topic introduced by the "law" in question:  a single word or phrase followed by a brief aphorism.  Even though the chapters are independent, a particular view of the world emerges from the whole as you read.  That doesn't mean it's a work of philosophy, either—Prof. Feisel uses no fancy philosophical vocabulary, and makes no pretense of adhering to any particular philosophical or religious system. 

Finally it struck me what the book was:  it's a work of wisdom literature for 21st-century engineers. 

Wisdom literature is what scholars call the literary genre represented by the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible.  These books are collections of short, informal words of advice, without much in the way of overall organization or pattern, but rich with anecdotes, stories with a moral, and observations on human nature.  So is Lyle's Laws. 

Wisdom is not a word that gets a lot of use these days.  I once heard it defined as the ability to apply knowledge effectively, and that covers not only what engineers should do but what anyone with specialized knowledge has an obligation to do.  Many, if not most, of Lyle's Laws are not original.  For instance, No. 25, "Possibility:  If it can happen, it will happen" derives from that principle known to all working engineers, Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will.").  But Feisel's form of the law allows for unexpected good things to happen as well, though you shouldn't count on them happening as a part of your design!  I heard a version of another law—"Discoverability:  Don't record anything you don't want the whole world to see"—from an older engineering professor in the 1990s, who told me he always warned his students not to write down anything that you wouldn't mind seeing reprinted on the front page of the New York Times.  But that's what wisdom consists of:  basic truths about human nature and human relations that are often learned by experience and passed on from generation to generation.  As C. S. Lewis pointed out in The Abolition of Man, it's as hard to devise a truly original moral principle as it is to come up with a new primary color besides red, blue, and green. 

But if there is moral medicine in Lyle's Laws, it is covered with a pleasant and engaging outer coating of war stories (some of them literally that:  the author is a Navy veteran), professional and personal tales that introduce many of the chapters, and a tone that is never preachy or didactic.  Sometimes you read a book and wish you could meet the author afterwards, and this is that kind of a book. 

This is true despite the fact that I found myself mentally squirming after reading a few of the chapters, notably the one entitled "Comfort:  Beware the cozy comfort zone."  Somewhere in the book I came across the question, "What do you know how to do now that you didn't know how to do a year ago?"  That prompted me to think about how much of what I do is simply more of the same, and how much is something I don't know how to do, but want to learn, even at the cost of some mental anguish and frustration.  This is an especially good question for tenured professors, who sometimes appear to the outside world to be entitled to coast for the rest of their lives.  Fortunately, I was able to come up with a few things I've learned in the past year, anyway, and I hope to add to the list as time goes on. 

Who should read this book?  I think there's a difference between who should read it and who will read it.  I would like every undergraduate engineering student in the English-speaking world to read the book (and so would Prof. Feisel, obviously).  If they did, and if they took the advice in the book to heart, they could avoid a lot of the errors, screwups, and cases of bad judgment that sometimes make the lives of young engineers as interesting as they are.  But that is a dream impossible of realization, short of some rich guy taking the notion to send free copies to all engineering schools.  I suspect that many of the people who will read the book are those of us in the late summer and fall of our careers, who can relate to the historical situations that Prof. Feisel alludes to and resonate with the truths he elucidates from his stories and experiences.  But the book would also serve as a good recommended read for engineering ethics courses, and I hope it will be used that way.

In my technical lectures, I occasionally mention a historical anecdote in connection with my technical topic of the day, and I have learned that a little of such material goes a long way.  Most young people, at least most young engineering students, are not that interested in history.  The spirit of our age is inherently forward-looking and views history as something to be overcome and surpassed, not something to learn from.  And for the most part, that is a good thing.  Too much regard for the past keeps you from moving into the future as fast as the next guy, as I have learned from my own experience.  But the human side of engineering is a function of human nature, which doesn't change.  And Lyle's Laws is one of the most easily read, and yet rewarding, works on human nature and engineering that I have come across in years.

Sources:  Lyle's Laws:  Reflections on Ethics, Engineering, and Everything Else, by Lyle D. Feisel, was published in 2013 by Brooklyn River Press, New York.

Miracle on 45th Street: Role of the Engineers

What could have been a tragic airplane crash that killed over 150 people turned last Thursday into one of those rarities, a big news story with a happy ending. When Pilot Chesley Sullenberger mentioned a minute into his flight out of New York's La Guardia Airport that he was seeing a lot of birds, he probably didn't think that a few seconds later, both of his engines on the dual-engine Airbus A320 would flame out simultaneously. But the flight data recorder shows that is exactly what happened once the plane reached an altitude of 3,200 feet.

We don't know for sure if it was birds that caused the accident, but what we do know is that everything happening after that had years of skilled professional and engineering planning behind it. Sullenberger, as it happened, had made a study of how cockpit crews react to emergencies, and was planning after retirement to start an airline-safety consulting business. I would say that his chances of succeeding in that business are greatly improved after what happened next. By all reports, he calmly steered the aircraft down the center of the Hudson River, got on the PA system to the passengers to say only one thing: "Brace for impact," and splash-landed the craft intact, unless you count the loss of one engine, which was not doing him any good at that point anyway. Although there were isolated cases of panic on the part of the passengers, the plane remained afloat long enough for everyone—100%—to get out alive and reasonably well. Some people even went back to the airport and continued on their travels right away.

The word "miracle" is being used a lot to describe what happened. I will not argue with that. If you had asked me what the chances of survival were on a flight that lost power less than a mile above the Hudson River, I would not have given you very good odds. Over my years of airline travel, I have watched dozens of times as flight attendants went through the FAA-required safety lecture, complete with gestures involving seat belts and those improbable-looking life vests that they never actually inflate. I had come to regard the whole thing as a kind of ceremony done not for any practical consequences it might have, but merely to make the passengers feel better. Listening to them talk about inflating the vest by blowing into the mouthpiece and so on usually reminded me of an alternative version an irreverent colleague once told me: "In case of emergency, put your head down between your knees and kiss your a-- goodbye."

But the miracle of flight 1549 makes me rethink these cynical musings. It is indeed possible to splash-land a commercial airliner in such a way that if it happens to come down in the middle of one of the most rescue-ready waterways in the world, all the passengers and crew members can get out safely. I have been unable to discover how deep the water was at the crash site, but it was apparently too deep to support the plane, which nevertheless floated long enough for a successful rescue operation.

The fact that it did so, and that it didn't break up on impact, and that the engines didn't set the whole plane on fire after they failed, and a number of other fortunate occurrences that I am not technically savvy enough to imagine, is due not only to the grace of God, and the skill of the pilot and co-pilot, but to the planning, experience, and wisdom of the engineers who designed and built the A320 Airbus. Not every kind of aircraft could withstand that sort of abuse, but this one did. The survival of the passengers depended on the integrity of the airframe, which came through with flying colors (or floating, as the case may be).

Perhaps it is petty to quibble about a minor point, but the only thing that would make this good story better would be to discover that there were actually enough life rafts on the plane to accommodate all the passengers. I don't know whether there were or not. Now in the case of a 747 or something equally large, I don't think surviving a water landing is feasible. The stresses on such a structure would simply be too great, and even if you packed enough life rafts for the over 350 passengers, there might not be any room left for luggage. But after Sullenberger's triumph, we should at least give some thought to the question of how to survive a similar splash landing in the open sea.

In the early days of commercial air travel, many if not most intercontinental flights used "flying boats" intentionally designed to land on water. The reliability of reciprocating engines was simply not that great, and it was probably a good public relations move for airlines such as Pan Am to be able to reassure the public that even if all the engines failed (and there were usually four), there was at least a chance of landing safely on the water, whereupon the plane would float indefinitely. Once engine reliability improved, the flying boats gradually disappeared, although there are a few left for specialty purposes. It turns out that water landings have their own hazards, so the increased safety of water-landing aircraft is more apparent than real.

But the good news coming out of the Hudson River last Thursday was real, and I hope this incident enters the engineering ethics literature as a good example of things going right. It is fully as exciting a story as many less fortunate technical mishaps, and has a happy ending. One of my colleagues used to summarize his goals in teaching engineering ethics as "No headlines." Generally that is good advice, but the headlines about the miracle on 45th Street, near the Manhattan shore where the plane landed, were welcome news indeed, for engineers and for everyone else.

Sources: I drew upon several news reports for this column, including a New York Daily News item at http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/01/15/2009-01-15_passengers_in_us_airways_hudson_river_cr.html and a Yahoo News item at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090118/ap_on_re_us/plane_splashdown, which carried information about the flight data recorder.