Anders Johansson wrote:
On Saturday 29 April 2006 14:11, Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Saturday 2006-04-29 at 13:32 +0200, Theo v. Werkhoven wrote:
Well..... A4 is the international ISO stadard for paper size. Now you know the frustration for 5 billion other people on earth who try to use pretty much any software/OS that defaults to US Letter.. Not to mention all the engineers in the 21th century who have to have to revert to 18th century measurement "standards" when they try to speak with their US collegues. And that was the cause of the failure of one (two?) NASA missions to Mars: wrong unit conversions.
My favourite is the Canadian incident, where they ordered the amount of fuel in kilos but received it in pounds, so they went flying with half a tank
You're referring to the "Gimli Glider" (google for more info), named after the abaondoned WW2 air base where it landed. There were a few factors that led to that incident. The plane had a defective fuel gauge. When that happens, they are supposed to use a dip stick, to measure fuel levels, which they failed to do. If they'd performed that check, the miscalculation would have been caught.