OSD 316: Sig Sour?

On pointing the Sig P320 at your femoral artery.

Back in 2015 the experienced crew of the SS El Faro, a 790-foot cargo ship, unknowingly sailed their ship straight into a Category 3 hurricane, leading to the loss of the ship and all 33 people aboard.

How can that happen?

The NTSB released a transcript from the ship’s voyage data recorder, a cockpit voice recorder–like device that records every sound on the ship’s bridge. In the transcript, and in the edited form of this excellent article by William Langewiesche about El Faro’s demise, you see a blow-by-blow of the crew’s final 26 hours, 1 minute, and 41.4 seconds.

What it shows is a series of small mistakes and wishful thinking that may be familiar to you if you’ve ever worked on a complex project involving a large group of people:

• Minimizing or ignoring bad news, and overindexing on glimmers of hope. Hope as a strategy.

• Operating on incorrect or stale data

• Different people on the team using different data, sometimes without even knowing it

• Each person in the management chain knowing something is wrong but hesitating to (metaphorically) pull the andon cord or send bad news up the chain

• Get-there-itis, or plan continuation bias. The tendency to continue following the original plan even after new information reveals it is no longer advisable.

Stack up those mistakes, add in some very bad luck, and a group of very competent people can steam their ship right into disaster.

Last week, Sig came out swinging against the persistent rumors that the P320 can go off without a trigger pull:

For easy clicking, here’s the full version of each image from their post:

It would be easy to say from behind a keyboard that the P320 is a piece of junk. The reality is that we don’t have enough information to say something like that. But here’s what we can say:

• The original version of the Sig P320 was not drop safe, and Sig continues to this day to deny that the gun was ever uniquely dangerous. In 2017, they started a “Voluntary Upgrade Program” (emphatically not a recall) that they describe as “refin[ing] functionality for the pistol and improv[ing] both its ergonomics and performance” and “improv[ing] the trigger-pull experience”. That is technically true, because if gravity pulls the trigger for you and shoots you with your own gun, that is definitely a trigger-pull experience that could use improvement.

• The original version of the P365 had widely reported issues with the firing pin breaking, which Sig silently fixed and never publicly acknowledged.

• The P320 continues to be dogged by rumors that it goes off on its own. The most detailed video of one such instance is from the Montville, CT police department, where a P320 went off while in an officer’s holster. English Al at World’s Best Guns wrote a persuasive breakdown of how this was caused by a design flaw in the gun. There’s a very long thread at pistol-forum.com detailing rolling design changes in the P320 that Sig has never acknowledged but which strongly suggest that Sig has been aware of (and then simply silently fixed) P320 safety flaws.

• Sig’s other major ground-up designs from the past ten years, the MCX (a short-stroke gas piston gun based on the AR lower) and the Cross (a bolt-action rifle) both had safety problems in their first generation designs — unintentional firing and delayed firing, respectively. Sig, to their credit, issued formal recalls for both guns.

Those are all real issues. And with the exception of the MCX and the Cross, Sig minimized or ignored them and hoped customers wouldn’t notice. Maybe there’s something to that, because so far customers haven’t noticed — the top two best-selling handguns in the US are Sigs. But at this point the issue isn’t whether there is still a problem in the latest generation of the P320. The issue is whether Sig can be taken at its word as a company. Unfortunately, their actions since 2017 have not earned them that level of trust. Hopefully their actions in the future will.

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This week’s links

Good YouTube channel: Sig Mechanics

Here’s an example video, and they’re all similarly technical:

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