> And so, while it is true that flying today is much safer than it was in 1974 — passengers today need not worry about their planes crashing because of badly de

> And so, while it is true that flying today is much safer than it was in 1974 — passengers today need not worry about their planes crashing because of badly designed doors — the same basic factors that led to the DC-10 cargo door saga still exist and still cause accidents. I guess we still do have to worry about the doors and door plugs today. Maybe the 737 Max is the new DC 10? > All systems intended to ensure that the door was properly closed had now been overcome […] Countless side characters stepped in and out of the picture, from the engineer who certified his own work and missed a clear design flaw, to the Turkish Air Force officials who wanted to use the DC-10 to carry troops to Cyprus, each of them unwittingly playing a small but possibly crucial role in the buildup to disaster. It wasn’t just a door — it was the system itself which failed. This article totally reminded me of one I read in the Atlantic many years ago analyzing a different airline crash. I’ll try to find the link, but the author or one of the main interviewers had argued that in airline safety, Murphy’s Law is the exact opposite of what happens. In reality, if anything can go right, it will go right, and we only get catastrophes when every part of a system fails, and a whole chain of events conspires to go wrong. They made a compelling case in the article, and this one backs the argument up completely. Fascinating. Edit: The Lessons of ValueJet 592 https://web.archive.org/web/20230103195248/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/03/the-lessons-of-valujet-592/306534/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230103195248/https://www.theat... “The ValuJet accident is different. I would argue that it represents the third and most elusive kind of disaster, a "system accident," which may lie beyond the reach of conventional solution, and which a small group of thinkers, inspired by the Yale sociologist Charles Perrow, has been exploring elsewhere—for example, in power generation, chemical manufacturing, nuclear-weapons control, and space flight. “The people involved do not consciously trade safety for money or convenience, but they inevitably make a lot of bad little choices. They get away with those choices because, as Perrow says, Murphy's Law is wrong—what can go wrong usually goes right. But then one day a few of the bad little choices come together, and circumstances take an airplane down. Who, then, is really to blame?”