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How to Keep a Plane in the Sky - Alex Davies ****

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering.

The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances.

When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human ingenuity. And there are plenty more stories that are equally engaging.

The book is very US-oriented, although there are a few examples from elsewhere. Initially I was a little surprised about this, considering this is a country that lets most of its population at large with guns (what could possibly go wrong?), but I realised that the examples where the US is lax on safety tend to be where the individual is at fault rather than the manufacturer. Where litigation is an option, companies take more care.

Davies divides the topic up into six types of requirements for testing: limits, fool-proofing, disintegration, scale, dynamics and intention. Particularly salient at the moment was the 'intention' chapter, this being where there can be unintended consequences even when the product does everything right. A fair amount of this chapter covers AI, where it's really difficult to test because unlike most engineering solutions, we don't know why the product is doing what it does.

The biggest flaw in the book is that, outside of the stories, the basic detail can be a little plodding, sometimes listing too many examples without giving us enough to engage with what was happening, or going too much into the specific legal framework or organisation responsible for doing the testing. If I was fussy about testing the contents of a book to its limits, I'd also say that Davies' decision to call Ada Lovelace a 'technology pioneer' was distinctly unfair on Charles Babbage.

Overall, though, as consumers, this is a book we all should appreciate.

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