What do you think?

I am confused. I do not know what to believe. Just when I thought I had resolved my quandary about whether to fuel before an early morning run, along comes another study that casts doubt on my decision. According to Professor Tim Spector we need a 14-hour period of not eating, so if we eat dinner at 8.00 pm we should not eat breakfast until after 11.00 am the next day. Of course, the easiest way to check on my regime would be to analyse my 
performances. Unfortunately, there are a myriad of other factors that influence my performance and I have not had a sufficiently long period of steady-state results to give a statistically valid conclusion on the benefits of fuelling up before I 
step out.

One benefit of running outdoors, fuelled or hungry, is the time to ponder on issues such as this. There is not an obvious connection, but I progressed to thinking about NDT reliability. For about 30 years there has been a myriad of studies looking at reliability and providing recommendations on actions to take to ensure reliable inspections. In a similar manner to diet advice, such a large and continually updated repository of knowledge generates a variable uptake of the different options available. Often, this is driven by regulators, specific industry sectors, manufacturers (integrating features into equipment), individual clients or NDT vendors. I am not aware of any consistently applied baseline for the reliable application of NDT, beyond operator certification. Hence, some NDT is applied without any consideration for reliability.

Please consider this and jot down or map your own ideas on how you can address NDT reliability in your day-to-day activities. It will be a break from the sudoku! The ideas can be small, targeted actions or wider ideas for consideration by the profession.

If you are willing to share these, please send them to the email addresses at the bottom. They will be collated and promulgated in a subsequent issue.

Please note that the views expressed in this column are the author’s own personal ramblings for the purpose of encouraging discussion within NDT News. They do not represent the views of Jacobs or BINDT.

Letters can be mailed to The Editor, NDT News, Midsummer House, Riverside Way, Bedford Road, Northampton NN1 5NX, UK. Fax: +44 (0)1604 438301; Email: ndtnews@bindt.org or email Bernard McGrath direct at bernard.mcgrath1@jacobs.com