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jamscal wrote:Maroon92 wrote:For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
GRMers would have ridden the horse anyway.
Lately I think they would have eaten it!
Joey
Chernobyl wasn't caused by any small error or minor oversight, it was an idiotic design put through an idiotic "test" where they basically did everything they could to make it blow up.
Some epic failures I can think of that were caused by simple/small problems:
DeHavilland Comet - was the first jet airliner, and many of them blew up in midair due to tiny cracks at the corners of the square windows. That's why modern airliners have rounded windows.
V-22 Osprey - most of the earlier crashes in its crash-filled history are due to flex joints in the hydraulic lines that allow the wings to fold. The wings have to fold so that it takes up the same space on a carrier as a helicopter. Turns out the flex joints weren't so good at flexing.
OpenSSH keyspace vulnerability - because somebody left a piece of testing code in place that was clearly marked as testing code. One small block of code, every Linux computer on the planet had to regenerate keys.
A website I maintain once went titsup because of a stray semicolon on an IF statement - that made it always return true, but it kept running as long as it got new entries in this event planning area. One day it ran out, and this line of code that was common to all pages got stuck in an infinite loop, trying to fetch new events when none existed. One semicolon, whole website down. Stuff like this probably happens a lot in software.
Curmudgeon wrote:I seem to recall an airliner crash caused by icing of a pitot tube that made the ASI not work and there was no alarm. That meant the crew didn't know they were close to stall speed.
Found it: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124411224440184797.html
It also seems that wasps may have nested in another plane's tubes!
Copilots loooove to leave the pitot anti-ice off!
NGTD wrote:914Driver wrote:IIRC this is a bood I read years ago about disasters throughout history. Big ones like the Space Shuttle, to Chernobyl and Bopaul and the DuPonts. Mr.s DuPont was big into TNT but safety was a lears-as-you-go kinda thing. Yeah, he killed himself.
Oil platform in the North Atlantic in winter, freshly painted over the summer; a painter slathered paint into a crack thinking he was doing a good thing.
My take away on the book: Every single failure has no less than three warning signs.
At the end of the bood were short incidents one or two paragraphs long. What the heck were you people thinking?
Dan
I tried to find that book in both the major Libraries in town today and struck out. I guess I will have to look into buying it.
Interlibrary loan + WorldCat = win. Ask your librarian. BTW, that book rules.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522
One more.........We hear this story every 2 years in our Human Factors training.
Not all of us would call this is an epic failure, but someone once posted "can we please stop hotlinking pics..." and then some surprisingly unexpected (and hilarious) consequences happened.
Bob
Bad pressure seal caused. Must have been weird to see this iced over plane flying on its own.
Appleseed wrote:NGTD wrote:I tried to find that book in both the major Libraries in town today and struck out. I guess I will have to look into buying it.
Interlibrary loan + WorldCat = win. Ask your librarian. BTW, that book rules.
I found it at our library. Unfortunately, all the versions in our system were first editions, which were published about 6 months before 9/11, and they don't include the WTC analysis.
