I have run into two black holes with liability insurance:

1. Everything going along GREAT – until you get a truly professional credential, like a P.E., whereupon your insurance rates become astronomical. So carefully evaluate your future before jumping in.
2. Taking a project in an area that turns out to have an astronomical potential liability. This hit me on a project at Lockheed to repair some circuit boards for one of their flight simulators, after others had failed to repair them. Everything went along GREAT – until a helicopter crashed in Afghanistan. So, what do circuit boards for simulators have to do with a real-life crash on the other side of the world? As it turned out, the flight crew had been trained on a simulator that failed to properly adjust flight characteristics for altitude, so in Afghanistan they just flew like they did in the simulator, whereupon the helicopter fell out of the sky and killed everyone aboard. Eventually some independent contractors got blamed, so ALL insurance carriers cancelled their contracts to anyone working on simulators, never mind that my work had NOTHING to do with programming, flight characteristics, etc., and further, my work was for secret MILITARY simulators (complete with an armed guard watching my every move), and the military is NOT known for suing people who screw up.

… and so ended another fun and lucrative contract.

Steve Richfield