31 Oct 2006 2338H

So much depends on a door handle, Pt II

In keeping with the Halloween season, because this blog is called Everything Is Design, and because my current kick is about designing error out of products, a la poka-yoke — that exotic, mystical, ancient, did I mention exotic already? Japanese practice of error proofing — I would like to share with you all two very sad and horrifying cases where door handles might have been better designed. They are particularly sad because design errors regarding door handles resulted in people dying, and it is horrifying because they died in horrific circumstances.

The first incident is the infamous Byford Dolphin diving bell accident. In this incident, a chamber attached to a diving bell, charged to 9 atmospheres of pressure, was explosively decompressed when one of the tenders inexplicably, and in his case, fatally, opened the door to the chamber. Not only was he killed when the door blasted open, but so were the four divers within the chamber. Because of one of the diver’s positions, and because of the sudden decompression, gases within his body expanded and literally tore his body apart, limb from limb. The others, well. . . I’ll let you read the rest. The point is, the door should never have been openable while the chamber was still pressurized.

The second incident is United Airlines Flight 811 out of Honolulu bound for Sydney via Auckland, a flight which I have in fact taken before, to study in Australia, after the fact. In this incident, as the 747 approached 23,000 ft, a cargo door tore open, decompressing the cabin; five rows of business-class seats were sucked out of the fuselage, along with nine passengers, several of whom were sucked into the number 3 engine. In this case, the outward-opening door contained a number of design flaws, which compromised the structural integrity of the aircraft and, more importantly, its occupants.

There’s really nothing else that can be said about this, so I’ll wrap it up shortly. But when people design systems on which people could die in case of improper usage, you might as well think about the worst case scenario, because if there’s a will, there’s a way. Let no one tell you that this design stuff doesn’t matter. The families of the victims of these incidents will tell you otherwise.

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