Investigators from North Pole Flight Command revealed today that a design flaw is the likely cause of the sleigh crashed reported earlier this week.
It seems an odd revelation because this year’s sleigh is based on last year’s record setting flight of Santa’s sleigh. So confident have designers and even Santa himself have been of the design used last year that it was duplicated with only minor changes for this year’s sleigh.
“We found the flaw was actually part of the sleigh Santa used last year,” said Elf Quinton Q. Quigley, head elf of Research and Development at the North Pole, the department charged with running the Sleigh Design Team. “Santa’s sleigh performed so flawlessly last year because it didn’t fly under the same challenging conditions of this week’s test flight. The design issue, coupled with the weather conditions at the time of the crash, coupled with the flight maneuvers we were running at the time, coupled with an under-carriage design that allowed water to accumulate and seep into critical flight components, combined to create perfect conditions for flight failure. It is doubtful that Santa would ever see those elements combine on his actual flight.”
As Elf Buck Sanchez, head of Flight Operations at the North Pole, noted, “This is why we test fly the sleigh. To put it through crucial paces that reveal problems. Then we fix them.”
The test flights of Santa’s sleigh will resume soon. But not before a whole new fleet of test sleighs are equipped with corrections to the design that caused the crash. Those new prototypes, or Gen 2 of this Sleigh Design, as the engineers call them, are under construction right now and will be pressed into service next week.
That means some changes to the flight schedule, which will be announced soon. Please stand by for more information.
