• Question: Describe a situation to do with engineering in which you had to make a difficult decision.

    Asked by amber1s to Ainz, Hannah, Norbert, Simon, Siu on 21 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Hannah Pearlman

      Hannah Pearlman answered on 21 Jun 2015:

      When I was a pretty new engineer I was asked to review a vehicle, to check it over and sign to say that it was safe to go testing. There was quite a bit of pressure to sign the vehicle off as ok, but I didn’t really know what I was doing or looking for and I had to make the difficult decision to say no to signing it off and having to find my manager to do this for me and explain the process to me.
      It did not make me popular, but I do not regret the decision at all, because if I had let myself be pressurised into doing it and there was a problem someone could have got seriously hurt and it would have been my fault.

    • Photo: Simon Lay

      Simon Lay answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      One of the most difficult things to do is tell someone that they can’t do something or that it cannot be done in the time. We were under a lot of pressure to get a beamline ready for 1st light and things were going badly. We discovered a vacuum leak somewhere in a large section of pipe 100 metres long. The scientist wanted to risk opening the valve at either end to transfer the X ray beam into his end station. Doing this might have contaminated the pipe work which had taken 6 months to condtion. He was willing to take the risk as he had to acheive first light as a politcal milestone. We wouldn’t authorise opening the vacuum valves. He was pretty upset as he had to go and tell the director that he had failed his deadline but we made the right decision as the leak turned out to be major. It delayed his project by less time that the accidental venting would have done once the leak was traced and fixed!

    • Photo: Norbert Gogiel

      Norbert Gogiel answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      Hi!

      The most difficult decision I encountered was I think when I had to choose on the material for one of our structures. I had to justify the choice. Changing it later would cause a lot of trouble, so I had to make sure 100 times that I am taking the right decision.

    • Photo: Craig Ainslie

      Craig Ainslie answered on 25 Jun 2015:

      I was in Afghanistan in 2012 and one of our Chinook helicopters was about to go on a mission to rescue an injured soldier. Unfortunately there was a mechanical problem just before take off and I had to make the decision to shut the aircraft down and move all the equipment and pilots to a different helicopter. At the time I thought I’d held up the mission but it turned out that there was a serious hydraulic leak so I was really pleased that I had the courage to stick to my decision!

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