The ability to lead a project depends heavily on your own knowledge and skill in the discipline. Our engineering project managers are engineers themselves. They can delegate or coordinate, but ultimately they too know what it is they are talking about.
Congratulations you have just described inert gas. Again, at design concentrations for most inert gas systems, it lowers the oxygen concentration to what it would be at a very high altitude, which is still breathable. By the time it actually gets down to that concentration, you are already out of the room and have closed the door. Fire can’t subsist without at least 16% oxygen. Humans can breathe oxygen less than 16%, albeit not terribly comfortably and not forever, but it is absolutely possible.
Yes, a marketing team would want to make videos that show their product in a positive light, so of course 3M is going to tell you that Novec is the best thing since sliced bread. But in practice, it isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I’m working on a project that we were originally going to design with Novec but now are using inert gas. It only added a couple of extra tanks, which aren’t super huge to begin with, so the impact isn’t that great.
Money doesn’t grow on trees, and you can’t always afford every single bell, whistle, gadget, or McGuffin that is theoretically possible. Sometimes the best course of action is to cut your losses, do what the pocketbook allows you to do, and move on. Things can be replaced, people cannot.
I bring up the hangar example again because it’s a pretty good case study, because AFFF foam faces the same problems a lot of clean agent systems have - PFOS. AFFF systems are fantastic at putting out fuel spill fires. But, as research has shown, they have a pretty high rate of unwanted/accidental discharges, on top of their environmental and health effects. There are foam products that are fluorine-free, of course, but those systems aren’t much cheaper than legacy AFFF systems, and if you’re storing unfueled, defueled, or even partially fueled aircraft that you aren’t servicing, but just storing, how big is your risk for a fuel spill fire?
Think about cars in a parking garage. They have tons of fuel all in one place. You’d think foam would be a no-brainer for a place like that. But you almost never see foam in parking garages, just sprinklers. Why? Well, what’s the risk of a sudden gasoline fire in a garage? What would even start such a fire? What are the chances of that? Low. How low? Low enough to say “Just sprinkler it, it’s fine”. So if we don’t put foam in parking garages, why should we do the same to hangars that just store aircraft?
Theoretically, can you put fluorine-free high-expansion foams in every single little pudknocker hangar across the country, even ones that store one little Cessna? Sure. But why would you incur all that cost for something relatively low-risk?