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6 Small Math Errors That Caused Huge Disasters

6 Small Math Errors That Caused Huge Disasters

By: Chris Radomile Add to Favorites January 09, 2012
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If there are any children reading this, there's really only one thing we want to tell you about adulthood: If you make one tiny mistake, people will die. Don't believe us? Let us share these tales of completely forgivable design mistakes that cost lives.

#6. An Airliner Crashes Due to Square Windows

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Wikipedia

In the 1950s, companies were making the first foray into jetliners, and leading the pack was the de Havilland

Comet. It was a state-of-the-art jet with many never-before-seen features, such as a pressurized cabin that allowed it to fly higher and faster than other aircraft. Unfortunately, in 1954, two Comets disintegrated midflight for no apparent reason, killing 56 people total. In retrospect, the name "Comet" was a bad choice.

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retrothing.com Although it was superior to de Havilland's first choice, the "Murder Bird."

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The Laughably Simple Flaw:

It had square windows. This is one of those things that is easy to miss (the designers missed it, for instance) but easy to understand once it's explained. Here's a Kit Kat style candy bar. Where would you say this thing is most likely to break when pressure is applied?

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Right there at those sharp notches, obviously. That's why they're there, and it's why no one builds important structures out of Kit Kats. Well, a square window is made up of four 90-degree notches cut out of your wall, creating four of these weak points. You don't need a diagram -- if you have brick or stucco on your house, go outside and look. You'll find cracks there, protruding right from one of those sharp corners:

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Getty To fix, place head in bucket of sand and hum loudly.

In engineering, that sharp corner (or groove in the Kit Kat) is called a "stress concentration," a spot where the shape of the object makes it more likely to break under stress.

You don't want the red bit.

So if you're an airplane maker, how the hell do you fix that? Well, have you ever noticed how on every plane you've ever been on, the windows you look out of have rounded corners? Those curves are pretty much the only thing keeping the plane from tearing itself apart in midair like in that scene from Fight Club. It distributes the stress to all of the various points along the rounded curve, rather than on that one sharp corner, which otherwise would (as they found out) tend to pull apart and form a crack over time. Trust us, this was not easy to figure out. Experts had no idea why the planes weren't holding together until they tested the structure by simulating the repeated pressurization of the cabin. Sure enough, the fuselage eventually burst like a bootleg condom, and the break started with cracks right at those window corners.

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Representatives from competing companies Boeing and Douglas both said that their engineers hadn't thought of it either, and that if the Comet hadn't been first, it would have been one of theirs that crashed. Planes have

had windows with rounded corners ever since.

#5. Fighter Jets Crashed Because of the Angle of the Runway

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Wikipedia

You don't have to be a pilot to guess that landing on an aircraft carrier is really fucking hard. It's a tiny little landing strip crowded with other planes, bobbing up and down in the waves. Keep in mind, this is with a whole host of instruments, computers and signals to help guide planes in. The early planes didn't even have that. But there was another problem ...

The Laughably Simple Flaw:

Here's what the earlier carriers looked like. Couldn't be simpler, right?

Wikipedia

It's a floating runway. How else would you design it? Well, that design was kind of a suicide factory. As you can see, planes waiting to take off sit at the other end of the runway you're trying to land on. If you don't get stopped in time, you're going to create one hell of a fireball. And getting stopped in time was no small thing -- catching the arresting wire (the thing that stopped the plane) was a tricky business. Eventually carriers went with the cartoon-logic solution and installed barrier nets to stop planes if they missed all the wires. However, it wasn't all that uncommon for aircraft to bounce over the barrier.

militaryvideocom Like skipping stones over a pond, if the pond had sharks and you had no arms.

So what was the brilliant innovation that allowed them to make landings that much safer? They angled the landing strip about nine degrees.

Wikipedia And as the Navy learned from trailer parks, double-wide is always better.

Don't laugh -- it took years to come up with it. While some of the greatest technological advances in history, including space flight and splitting the goddamn atom, came from developments during World War II, we didn't think of angling the flight deck until 1952. Prior to that, every landing was a potential rear-end collision. By angling the deck, a plane that missed the wires could go to full throttle, take off again and come around for another pass. Planes waiting to take off are near the bow, out of harm's way.

See? Absolutely no planes in the way.

Angling the deck also allowed for the tactical advantage of being able to launch and recover aircraft simultaneously, whereas in WWII, launching had to be postponed while landings were occurring, and vice versa. Who knows how many lives could have been saved if someone had thought of doing this about 10 years sooner.

#4. A Huge Walkway Collapses Due to a (Seemingly) Inconsequential Design Change

commandsafety

When designing their newest hotel to be built in downtown Kansas City, the fine people at Hyatt Regency wanted all the bells and whistles in it. The architectural firm in charge of the building design came up with a series of aerial walkways suspended from the ceiling so that guests could people-watch from a heightened vantage point. All in all, it was a pretty nifty feature. Until it suddenly collapsed and killed more than a hundred people.

Wikipedia "We can claim these were either terrible walkways or aggressively efficient elevators."

The Laughably Simple Flaw:

One long rod was replaced with two short ones. If there's one principle consistent across all human nature, it's that we will always prefer the path of least resistance (i.e., "if you can get away with a half-assed job, do it"). The original plan was for two walkways that were directly on top of one another to both be supported by one very long rod that would anchor into the ceiling. Like so:

This is a highly technical diagram.

Looks pretty simple, right? It all hangs off one long rod, which makes it strong, but also makes it a pain in the ass to assemble -- the rod has to extend through both walkways and then alllll the way up into the ceiling. Just in general, big pieces are hard to work with -- what's easier, to carry a whole assembled desk into your house, or a series of small pieces? The rod also has to be threaded all the way along its length so you could screw that nut up to that top platform spot. Got to be an easier way, right? So, the steel company in charge of making the rods made a design change by replacing the single rod with two shorter ones, shown below.

The guy with the hat is Rodney, a multimillion-dollar investor. The other is Nutter.

Easier to work with, easier to install, works exactly the same. Right? That little change killed 114 people, injured 216 more and cost $140 million in lawsuits. Look at the first image again.

Nutter has an idea for an FTL drive, but also a tool that injects bacon with peanut butter.

One rod, two nuts. Each nut only has to carry the weight of its own platform. Which is good, because each nut (and the welded beam it's screwed to) is only rated to carry the weight of one platform. Now look at the second image. See the nut we've labeled "OH SHIT"?

The twain shall never meet, and civilization is hollower for it.

That one single nut now has to carry the weight of BOTH platforms, and all the doomed tourists standing on them. Look obvious? Congratulations, because none of the professionals at either company caught it. And so, one night during a dance competition, the stressed "OH SHIT" nut cleaved clean through the beam and the walkways collapsed.

Wikipedia

Considering this was 1981 and something called a tea dance, we're willing to rule it a suicide on the part of the building.

During the ensuing lawsuits, it came out that neither the steel company nor the engineering firm in charge of construction had even bothered to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation that would have shown them this glaring flaw.

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685 Comments
ThereIsNoSpoon!

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01/10/12 04:49 AM

+1

Great article. Anyone ever walked across the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan on Labor Day? That thing moves back and forth almost 12 feet in each direction. And you can see straight down to the Strait. And

it's about five miles long. Good thing it hasn't collapsed yet. Reply

KevinGallacher

01/10/12 04:27 AM

There was the Gimli Glider (although not really a disaster as the pilot saved managed to land), it was a commercial flight were the ground refueling technician put 25,000lbs of fuel instead of 25,000 KG's which is less than the half required. Reply

Orly!?
"Coque indeed".-HA!!!

01/10/12 04:25 AM

Reply

KevinGallacher
A lot of these aren't really mistakes as much as trial and error.

01/10/12 04:24 AM

You can't design a brilliant piece of engineering from scratch it takes years of trial and error. Many of the standard safety procedures come about due to accidents and lessons learned. Reply

originaldavejam
Why are all these dogs dying? Justice for the dogs!

01/10/12 04:10 AM

+1

Reply

tbo

01/10/12 03:38 AM

I remember #2 and #4 from high school physics. I remember #3 from somewhere, but who knows where. The others were nice and informative, as is typical of good Cracked articles. Reply

tread

01/10/12 03:33 AM

Poor Nutter! That story really gets ya right here, y'know? Or, to put it in memetic: still a better story than Twilight. Reply

killer3000ad

01/10/12 02:59 AM

+2

Cracked missed out on the European mars mission when the lander crashed into piece on Mars cause it deployed its landing thrusters too late, because the lander was built in the US to take in imperic values (pounds, miles) whilst the Euros went and fed it metric values (kilograms, kilometres). A simple question would have avoided the loss of billions of Euros and the years waiting for the lander to reach Mars. All that time and nobody bothered to check what values the damn lander was programmed to use. Reply

Beowulf1990

01/10/12 03:56 AM

+1

One more reason for the Americans to stop being dumbasses and use scientific measures for their science.

theSurgeon8

01/10/12 04:33 AM

too bad there was no deaths there to human or animal lives which is what the Disaster stands for in the article

jonnan001

01/10/12 02:41 AM

+2

I hate to post it here, but the obvious 1st place 'Winner' would have been the Columbia. After the fact simple back on envelope calculations showed the mass and relative speed of the foam dripping off of the booster rockets was well more than enough to blow through the leading edge of the wing. But it was so counter intuitive even to engineers that it wasn't until they actually set-up a demonstration and proved it wasn't just a mathematical oddity, in practice foam at that velocity would blow through the wing that they admitted what had actually happened. And these were engineers. Reply

VerminJerky

01/10/12 02:41 AM

+2

One of the most interesting and well-explained articles I've ever read on Cracked. I'll be watching for your work, Mr. Radomile. Reply

phynex

01/10/12 02:25 AM

-2

"Angling the deck also allowed for the tactical advantage of being able to launch and recover aircraft simultaneously, whereas in WWII, launching had to be postponed while landings were occurring, and vice versa. Who knows how many lives could have been saved if someone had thought of doing this about 10 years sooner." Simultaneous launch and receive is made possible by the jet engine combined with that steam powered booster. Just look at the image you used to diagram the change made. Do you think a corsair or hellcat would be able to take off in that short of a distance? Good article but a glaringly obvious point missed on that one. Reply

TylerM

01/10/12 02:51 AM

Then they would have just made it longer. Had they thought to do this in the 40s, of course.

tread

01/10/12 03:36 AM

Um, no, wrong. The majority of the length of carriers' decks was for storing planes and landings. Takeoff could be done, as it was with scout planes on battleships and cruisers, with a very short catapult. The scouts had to land on pontoons and be recovered by crane. Carrier planes were superior because they weren't hindered by pontoons. WWII planes needed a lot less airspeed to take off than modern jets.

fartinyourmouth
Who wants some more of my tasty farts in their mouths?

01/10/12 02:14 AM

-10

11

Reply

haefi

01/10/12 02:03 AM

The other small error that sank the Titanic was the key for the binoculars store they didn't have on board, so they saw the iceberg to late.

Reply

marshmallowpie

01/10/12 02:26 AM

I heard they just couldn't find the binoculars, but they're kind of the same thing. Various things could've prevented the Titanic from sinking. One big one? The bottom part of the ship has various chambers with watertight doors, that way, if there was a big hole in the ship they could close the chambers before they all got filled up. And they did close the chambers when they crashed into the iceberg, and it COULD'VE worked... Except the ceilings weren't watertight. The water just broke through the ceilings and got into the other chambers, causing the ship to sink. The end!

tandanus

01/10/12 04:39 AM

And they only figure on only a few compartments being flooded, not as many as were flooded... That, and the steel used in the ship was some of the hardest available..."hardest" also meaning "brittlest", which got even more brittle in the sub-zero North Atlantic. They may as well have built it out of glass.

Lyhalan

01/10/12 02:00 AM

+4

I never knew aircraft carriers were designed like that. I learn more from this website than real life sometimes. Reply

rabanete
It swings inward.

01/10/12 01:29 AM

+1

Reply

MrNumbers

01/10/12 12:53 AM

+1

Damnit, this comes when I was writing a Doctor Who fiction on the Cocoanut grove. A month of research wasted on Cracked readers... -Tears Microsoft Word up into scrap paperReply

George_Berry
Really interesting article.

01/10/12 12:34 AM

+2

Reply

andromedaaaaaa
why do the parts where the dogs die bother me most?

01/10/12 12:32 AM

+9

11

especially the narrows. GAH. opening the door for my dog would have been the FIRST thing i did. yes even before grabbing my beloved camera, and i'm a photographer ffs. i can't imagine putting anything i loved through that :( so sad See All 4 Replies Hide All
-8 3

Reply
11

Wanderer

01/10/12 01:37 AM

Wait, what? The bridge is swaying so badly you can barely get out of your car and run

away, and you say you would stop to open the door for your dog? Keep in mind that the guy didn't know whether he had time to get off the bridge or not. It's not as if he knew that he would have time to set up his camera after he ran away; for all he knew it was going to go any second. I think you're being a bit unfair on the poor guy, is what I'm saying.

GildaM

01/10/12 02:41 AM

We often have more sympathy for animals than for people because animals in such cases are entirely dependent on their owners to care for them. They aren't making the decisions, and indeed are incapable of doing so. That said, I agree with Wanderer here. When a bridge starts acting like it's going to collapse underneath me, if I'm by myself, I'm getting myself and any family members out of there. Only when that's taken care of am I going to think about pets. Of course it's sad that the dog died. On the other hand, it's a good thing that the dog was the only casualty of this disaster; it could have been much worse.

VegasBuckeye

01/10/12 12:12 AM

+7

I am fairly confident I could land a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier for real before I could do it on Top Gun for the NES. Reply

Crosbinator
But could you do it with the power glove?

01/10/12 03:54 AM

phantombk201

01/10/12 03:56 AM

Oh man,Landing in that game was so f*****g hard ! Out of hundreds of playthroughs i only finished this game like three times.

Jonman122

01/09/12 11:59 PM

+7

whats with people who keep saying "this is engineering flaws not math lol" like they know what they're talking about? don't you realise math and engineering corelate A LOT, and if they had done proper testing (which involves math, by the way) on most of these problems, they simply wouldn't have occured? Since when have people become so jaded they don't understand how much math you have to know to even be an engineer? (hint, if you didnt pass your high-end mathematics courses, in canada its called math principles, you won't even get close to getting in to an engineering course) See All 5 Replies Hide All
-4 2

Reply
6

MorganCampbell

01/10/12 12:17 AM

You don't "need" math to design or build. My father used pipe cleaners and bendy straws to design his house. Granted it wasn't a good house and you couldn't find a right angle to save your life, but it kept the rain out. Mostly.

andromedaaaaaa

01/10/12 12:35 AM

+4

building a shack is kinda a little bit different than building giant superstructures meant to facilitate the lives of thousands of people.

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