Engineering Design Flaws

Every good thing that happens comes with a price. Sometimes that price was negligible to the good that occurs and unfortunately sometimes that price was just too much to pay for a comparatively small good deed. The present world we live in lay its foundations on the engineering marvels over the past few decades. These engineering marvels are the epitome of ingenuity and they mark the success of the human race and engineers in specific. As a law of progress, even these successes towards the betterment of mankind were once met with an equally devastating failure or more commonly termed as engineering failures or engineering disasters. It is the duty and obligation of an engineer to respond to a need by building, creating or inventing something

The reasons behind these engineering disasters are usually considered to be human factors including ethical dishonesty, design flaws as a result of negligence or unethical practices, material failures, insufficient testing, extreme scenarios and most importantly a random combination of these. Some of these engineering disasters are a result of design flaw. These flaws could be a result of miscalculated design or the error could pop up during the transition from a 2D or 3D model to a real world implementation. The true horror is when all aspects of the design add up perfectly on paper and even in real world there seems to be no problem with it at all but still the design wasn’t just good enough to handle all possible worldly scenarios. One such example of an engineering disaster due to a design flaw where real world scenario wasn’t considered is the MGM Grand Hotel Fire. This event occurred on November 21, 1980, killing 87 people through smoke inhalation making it the third worst hotel fire tragedy in the US history. What failed was the design of the sprinkler system or to be more specific, having no sprinkler system in the first place at one of its restaurants, The Deli and the casino on the ground floor. In order to cut down the manufacturing cost by a few thousands of dollars it was

Well, it might sound tempting to cut down testing costs in such scenario but it is extremely important for a product to be tested thoroughly for safety. The mistake of not testing their new budget small car, the Pinto, proved explosive for Ford, literally! It was designed to have its thin metal sheet fuel tank between the rear axle and the rear bumper. What went wrong with this design is that, in a crash from behind, the fuel tank casing would tear open, spilling fuel which led to a high probability of explosion. And if by some miracle even after the tank was punctured and the fuel spell but there wasn’t an explosion, the design flaw in the doors caused it jammed shut at the impact of collision making it nearly impossible for the victim to exit the vehicle with as less injury as possible. The worst part was that Ford knew about this design flaw but choose not to test its severity or provide a solution before rolling out millions of Pinto and argued that it would be cheaper to pay for lawsuits than redesigning. This damaged Pinto’s reputation beyond repair. As a consequence, National high Traffic Safety Administration toughened their standards of rear end collision and enforced much more strongly that every car produced must comply with