No Highway
Theodore Honey is a shy, inconspicuous engineer whose eccentric interests are frowned upon in aviation circles. When a passenger plane crashes in Newfoundland under unexplained circumstances, Honey is determined to prove his unorthodox theory about what went wrong to his superiors, before more lives are lost. But while flying to the crash scene to investigate, Honey discovers to his horror that he is on board one of the defective planes and that he and his fellow passengers, including a friendly young stewardess and an aging movie actress, are in imminent peril.
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What Hacker News says
- Nevil Shute was an engineer and he wrote some well respected novels like the nuclear war story On the Beach (made into a movie twice), A Town like Alice (made into a film and TV series), and No Highway (sometimes called No Highway in the Sky after the title of the film based on it), which actually deals with aircraft engineering and the problems involved in designing early jet airliners.
- The executive had the authority to start or stop what engineers do. The moment of decision vests with the exec. The engineer did wrong things, and I suspect would own that they broke the 'engineers code' which is pretty much the apocryphal 'try to do no harm' thing doctors don't actually sign to. The exec on the other hand, had the 'earn shareholder money' mantra stamped into their DNA like a stick of rock candy. The morality play around what executive grades think, and do regarding societal expectations is pretty well understood: thats why its the mainstream of ongoing current fiction. If you want to look to fiction for instances of people saying scientists or engineers have to make moral decisions, you're going to C.P. Snow "the search" (1959) or Neville Shute "No Highway" (1948) while I can look down any bookshelf and find 'wolf of wall street' staring me in the eyes..
