What lessons can be learned from engineering failures?
Blame notwithstanding, much can be learned from engineering failures. Most obviously, they inevitably lead to design improvements in the engineered system or structure. But side benefits may include safety precautions and enlightened management behavior, as well as research and experimentation into the causes of failures. Most of the failures above involved a lack of checks in the design and implemenation of whatever failed. Such checks would have cost money, or time, or both. So one might conclude that corners were cut in most cases, especially since in nearly all cases design flaws either were detected (e.g. Challenger) or could have been detected (e.g. Hyatt skywalk) before failure, if not before being put into service. In many cases, the solution to the question “what caused the failure?” did not become clear until the engineers were looking for these solutions. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” could lead to a team of engineers trying to figure out why it did break, instead of the
