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Know-how has always passed from hand to hand

Every plant, rig and vessel runs on things its people know and nobody wrote down. That knowledge has always moved from one person to the next: at the console, in practice rooms, through manuals. Each way works. Each leaves something behind.

An instructor leans over a control console, pen in hand, while a room of test rig operators sits and watches. A thick binder lies open on the desk at right.
A training session for test rig operators in the control room of NASA’s High Pressure Facility.

At the console

The oldest way is to learn beside someone who already knows: an instructor at the console, the crew gathered round, the procedures open on the desk. Nothing teaches better. It reaches only the people in the room, and only for as long as that instructor is there.

A man leans over a colleague seated at a desk of monitors in a replica reactor control room. Two more work at the consoles behind them.
The training replica of the Advanced Test Reactor control room at Idaho National Laboratory, 2011.

In a replica

Where a mistake costs too much to make on the real thing, operators train on a copy of the control room. It is the closest thing to the real plant. It also means building the room twice, so few operations ever have one.

A typed, spiral-bound page headed Section II, Principles of operation, explaining how an oxidant recorder works.
A page from the operating and maintenance instructions for Beckman Instruments’ Model 166 oxidant recorder.

In the manual

What can be written down goes into manuals. The good ones explain how the equipment works, not only what to do. What they rarely hold is judgement: which reading to doubt first, or what the last crew tried when the usual fix failed. And a manual only teaches someone who opens it.

Three operators in a control room lined with dials and chart recorders: one adjusts a dial from a step ladder, one changes a chart roll, one sits at the console.
Operators in the Plum Brook Reactor Facility control room, 21 March 1970.

When the crew moves on

NASA’s Plum Brook reactor in Ohio went critical for the first time in 1961. For the next two years, two operators were on duty around the clock until it reached full power in 1963. It ran until 1973, when the nuclear rocket program was cancelled.

When NASA began taking it apart, a quarter century later, people who had worked there came back to help. What a crew learns on shift goes where the crew goes.

Where OTTO comes in

OTTO starts from the same things people always have: the documents, an engineer who knows the system, and practice on something that isn’t the real plant.

It turns your manuals, notes and one recorded walkthrough into training rooms. The engineer reviews and corrects them before any learner sees them. Operators then practise in the browser while OTTO asks about their reasoning, so what the engineer knows can stay with the crew after the engineer moves on.

See how OTTO works

Pictures and sources

All four pictures are in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.