I have pointed out for some time now that it [Apollo 12] simply was not credible...
No, you've pointed out that
you don't believe it. That's an important difference. You don't get to make determinations of credibility for everyone else.
You just conceded elsewhere that appropriate expertise is required to discuss specialized topics, and you have none of the expertise that applies to your arguments here. You're not qualified to perform a space mission risk assessment or a commercial air travel risk assessment.
It has been explained to you why airliners are not like spacecraft. But you persist in drawing that comparison. So naturally we have to belabor it yet
again for you. How many times will we have to do this before you acknowledge it?
Cherry-picking.
Every airliner in the all the U.S. air carrier fleets is struck by lightning 1-2 times per year. The last recorded airliner crash due to lightning was in 1967. The FAA requires each new airframe to pass a lightning safety regime in which it is subjected to artificially generated lightning while instrumented for test.
Diverting an airplane after a lightning strike is not "as you would expect," but is in fact a rather rare event. It occurs only when there is an actual reported failure that violates the company's flight rules or FAA regulations (e.g., some airlines do not allow an airliner to fly if its weather radar is not working). It doesn't happen all the time just "for safety's sake." That's why the
one time it happens, it gets reported in the newspaper, while the dozens of other airliner lightning strikes that day go unreported.
You misrepresented the incident anyway. The airplane wasn't ordered to return; it was the
flight crew's decision to return after consulting with their company dispatcher to determine whether the schedule could absorb an inspection delay. The airplane was inspected, found not to be damaged, and it was returned to service an hour after landing.
And you also failed to consider Ryanair's record of lightning strikes. In 2006 a cluster of lightning-strike incidents focused lay criticism on Ryanair's safety. Although in that case only one airliner was diverted, and no significant damage occurred in any case, the company chose to improve its public relations image by responding more aggressively to lightning-strike incidents. It would be fair to say that Ryanair pilots and dispatchers are more "gun shy" on this point than other airlines.
Now given the option in this case of having the plane return for safety's sake, wouldn't one have expected the very same in the case of Apollo 12?
Of course not, because a commercial passenger flight and an Apollo lunar mission have absolute nothing to do with each other. And the reasons why have been belabored.
First -- and we have said this a million times -- a specialized scientific mission flown by test pilots simply has a higher tolerance for risk than a scheduled commercial airline flight. Pointing out that the Apollo 12 flight would have been more dangerous than Dublin-to-Manchester is irrelevant; it is known and agreed to be more dangerous. Your personal standard of safety, however derived, simply does not apply. You don't get to cry fraud just because they weren't as safe as you think would have been.
As noted above, you cherry-pick one outlying case. But you also change your argument. Because the Ryanair flight had only been in the air for a few minutes, you add the possibility of a "quick return to base" to your idea of what Apollo 12 should have done.
But that's not an option for Apollo 12. A Boeing 737 can be quickly and cheaply inspected, repaired, and returned to service. Airline passengers can be delayed or rebooked with only slight inconvenience. Life goes on. But an Apollo spacecraft is not reusable. Landing it explicitly ends the mission and effectively wastes all that was expended to initiate it. Apples and oranges, at least in terms of risk assessment. And as I discuss below, it wouldn't have changed anything.
And as noted below, the Apollo 12 spacecraft has checkout capabilities that an airliner does not have.
...systems checking out aside?
No,
not aside. Spacecraft are instrumented to a higher degree than airliners. In spacecraft the relevant values are telemetered to the people who designed the equipment. They can evaluate the condition of the spacecraft while the spacecraft is still in flight.
Airline instrumentation is, at best, stored onboard as a DFDR channel. At worst, the airliner must be connected to ground support equipment (GSE) and/or subject to a cycle electrical test (CET). In any case, the airliner has to land for inspection and repair.
Incidental to the landing is the safe deposition of passengers. If I, as a passenger, knew that the airplane could be certified safe after a lightning strike while still in flight, I'd elect to continue the flight. And the very low probability of critical damage due to lightning strike is why the absurdly overwhelming majority of stricken airliners simply proceed to the scheduled destination.
And in the Apollo 12 case the spacecraft could be so certified by its designers and buildings, based on the ability to telemeter important equipment-health parameters. But there was one exception -- the parachute deployment system. They feared the pyros might have fired, but there was no instrument to tell them whether they had. But since the parachutes don't affect anything on the spacecraft until landing, there was not reason not to continue the mission.
This is important. Your "quick return to base" scenario
would have had no advantage with broken parachutes. Get that through your head. The parachutes would have malfunctioned and killed the crew during your "quick return" just as effectively as they would have in a normal re-entry following an otherwise successful mission.
That's why the engineers come to a different conclusion than you do about what to do. They know how to evaluate specific mission phases and causal chains while you just wave your hands around hysterically and slam your fist down on the Abort button when your airliner runs out of lemon-soaked paper napkins.
And this little blurb about the Ryanair Flight helps to underscore Apollo fraudulence in this case.
No, it only underscores how little you really know about aerospace, how little research you do, and how careless you are about reasoning in general.
Regarding the latter, you first try to set up one incident as if it exemplified the entire phenomenon. You don't do any specific research on the incident, nor any research into the phenomenon as a whole. This is the fallacy of limited scope -- forming an explanation that works for only one case, but asserting that it should work for all.
Then you commit the reciprocal error. After having speciously formulated what you believe ought to be the general case, you attempt to paste that general case onto Apollo 12 without considering the specific reasoning that went into the decision to continue that one flight -- specifically the understanding that under the suspected pattern of failure, no kind of landing could be considered any safer than any other kind, and that the spacecraft could be affirmatively certified otherwise for flight.
You're still wallowing in the simplistic "broken spaceship = abort the mission" thinking without attempting to understand the highly commendable logic the engineers employed at the time. There's a reason why both the engineering and the piloting communities applaud the decision to continue the mission.
Finally, you're simply following your standard pattern of inventing new "rules" by which manned space flights should operate and then trying to say Apollo was fake for not following them. How many times are you going to do this before you realize that those arguments just don't stick?
