The ultimate contradiction:
An issue which bedevils the whole question of technical
history is the fact that if we are collecting data about failures, it must be because we are not preventing them. The
implications of this are summed up most succinctly by
Resnikoff (1978) in the following statement:
"The acquisition of the information thought to be most
needed by maintenance policy designers – information
about critical failures – is in principle unacceptable and
is evidence of the failure of the maintenance program.
This is because critical failures entail potential (in some
cases, certain) loss of life, but there is no rate of loss of life
which is acceptable to (any) organisation as the price of