Aircraft engine failure litigation (Cambridge courthouse)

The unnamed aircraft engine case Tom was testifying on when Columbia disintegrated. Used here as the setting for the Columbia coincidence, not for its engineering content.

There's one aside in that. I was testifying in an aircraft engine failure over here in the Cambridge courthouse, and they were asking me what I'd worked on and what I taught. I don't remember how it came up, but I basically said, well, things fail — for example, we have the space shuttle Challenger, and NASA knows there's going to be another failure sometime in the next 15 or 20 years and we just don't know when it's going to be. Guess what happened? The next morning the Columbia blew up. On Monday the other side settled the case, because the expert predicted it on the stand. I said, I — we don't know what it's going to be, but it just happened to be the next day. The insurance people were so nervous that some of the jurors were thinking I was a prophet who could never be wrong. So that was into that case. That's a true story. I was sort of surprised by all that.

---