The 20th Century: Loser Style

Ant wrote to us with Wired's depressing end of the century list. Reasoning that all of these "best of the eons" lists need to have an ugly relative, they commisioned the folks at Ig Nobel to come up with a list of notable failures.

Comments

"Wrong Way" Corrigan

[richieb]

Wired got this one wrong! Corrigan was a pilot who wanted to fly across the Atlantic, but the Civil Aviation Authority (the previous FAA) would not issue a formal permit for takeoff.

So instead he said that he was flying to California, with CAA's permission, and then after take-off he just flew to Ireland.

Afterwards, to keep the CAA off his back he said "oops, I made a mistake"...

...richie

Wired also got the Hancock tower wrong

[xyzzy]

The windows popping out of the Hancock tower were NOT due to the movement of the building, if I remember correctly. They were caused by a MUCH more subtle cause -- a design flaw in the double-paned construction of the windows.

Check out the following link:

http://www.sgh.com/hancock.htm

...for a report on the failure. A summary of this appeared in the Boston Globe a few years back. I would have thought that the IgNobel people (at MIT no less) would have known abou this.

I believe it is true, however, that the sway dampener in the Hancock was put in after its construction -- but I could be wrong, and can't find verification on the web.

Tu-144 Concordski

[theonetruekeebler]

I nominate the Tu-144 SST. The Tu-144 was a hastily assembled, politically motivated Soviet response to the Concorde and physically resembled that plane, except for the addition of canard control surfaces. Unfortunately, the design was terribly unstable. First tested in December 1968--before Concorde's first flight--the project was scrapped after the plane's very public and spectacular crash at the 1971 Paris air show. I think the Tu-144 stands as an excellent example of the type of failure that results from panicky first-to-market projects.

My other nomination is the Honest John, a short range missile developed for the U.S. military in the 1950s. Although a very capable weapon when carrying a conventional warhead, in 1954 the Pentagon insisted on deploying a nuclear-tipped version with a warhead of over 100 kiloton yield. Unfortunately, with a warhead that size, the blast radius of the missile exceeded its range.

So, any other nominations?

--

Still more inaccuracies!

[Tau Zero]

For example, the Chernobyl reactor didn't "melt down", it caught fire.

Not quite. It had a power surge due to being operated incorrectly, leading to a steam explosion. The steam explosion put graphite moderator in contact with white-hot naked fuel pellets (as well as removing the lid on the reactor), and that led to the fire.

There were numerous other air disasters they could have mentioned (like the DC-10 incident where an engine fell off, destroying hydraulic lines in the process. Turned out they'd been using a fork-lift to remove/replace the engine for servicing, messing up the mounting bolts).

And even that needn't have led to loss of the aircraft. When the engine fell off, both hydraulic systems for the left wing slat were taken out, and the slat retracted. This left the aircraft in an asymmetrical configuration, but it was still flyable; it was going fast enough that the wing did not stall even without the slats on that side. The pilot noticed that he'd lost an engine, and slowed down to the engine-out best-climb speed. This was below the stall speed for the now-slatless left wing, the aircraft uncontrollably rolled to the left, and it went into the ground with the loss of everyone on board. All this because the pilot had no way of knowing that he'd lost hydraulics and symmetry along with that engine.

IIRC, transport aircraft now have indicators to flag these failures to the flight crew.
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Several of these "Screw ups" are poorly explained

[.havoc]

Bhopal:
Union Carbide plamed for India's poorly educated workers refusing to follow safety proceedures and guidelines. UC paid dearly and mostly kept thier mouths shut.

Challenger:
Several Engineers had tried to stop the use of the material in the O-rings. Several Engineers had tried to stop the launch that morning. Some NASA bearucrat pushed the launch through for internal political reasons.

Another Shoot Down:
All of the bodies recovered from the water had been dead for more than 24 hours. Very little blood was present in the water. Suspected to be a ploy by the Iranian goverment to turn up the international Heat on the US. The approach of the "Irianian Jetliner" was wavetop and full throttle -- very un-jetliner behavior. It also failed repeatedly to respond to hails.

Cold Fussion:
To date, the results of Fleischmann and Pons have been replicated by 20-30 researchers -- Including Chemists at Texas A&M and Arizona State. There's something else going on here.

Y2K Bug:
I agree with the previous post about the cost of the Y2K bug.

The Vincennes tragedy

[Sheik Yerbouti]

I served four years in the USN as an operations specialist. And at one point was responsible for tracking a very active air picture in the Persian Gulf. The area is known as the aluminum cloud due to the high volume of aircraft flying in a very small area. We were briefed about the Vincennes tragedy upon entering the theatre of operations. As I understood it and this is probably the most reliable information on the subject you will get. The tragedy was not necessarily the fault of the captain of the USS Vincennes. The tragedy was caused by several factors not the least of which being that the Iranians fly there military aircraft out of their civilian airports. In other words they don't have air force bases per se. Every civilian airport may share it runways with military aircraft. So you may have two aircraft taking off in a short period of time one an Iranian F-14 and one an Airbus. A Navy Operations Specialist can tell the difference based on which modes of IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) the plane is squawking. A civilian plane squawks two modes of IFF one that reports its altitude (mode charley I believe) and one that reports its flight number (mode one if I remember correctly) (in most cases). NATO aircraft like the F-14s we gave to the Shah can squawk up to two more modes 3 and 4. Mode 4 is US only and encrypted this is how we tell they are US. Mode 3 is NATO for interoperating with our allies. Now you have two planes coming off the runway one squawking modes 1 and Charley and one squawking modes 1,3 and Charley. You know the one squawking 3 is an F-14. By the way air warfare happens so fast these days that a computer does the actual tracking with a human operator double-checking it. A human is pretty much incapable of manually tracking the complex air picture over the gulf. So with these aircraft coming off the same runway it's a simple matter for the computer to mix up their IFF squawks as the two contacts radar blips separate. One of the tools you use in the gulf to keep things straight is a superimposed map of the civilian air corridors over your radar display. The planes in those corridors are usually civilian and not a threat. What we had in this case was a plane that looked like it was squawking a military code (due to computer human error) heading straight for the Vincennes in a fairly volatile environment (remember the USS Stark that got split in half by an Iraqi Exocet). It was also not any where near a civilian air corridor. And did not respond to three separate warnings on several different international frequencies. The captain of the Vincennes in this case was following the rules of engagement for the gulf when he pulled the trigger. They really thought they were in danger he had to make a decision. And something like this would never have happened had the Iranians not had a propensity for hit and run attacks on American ships in the gulf at the time. And also not have been flying F-14s out of a civilian airport. Even today if this where to happen again it might result in the same outcome. It perhaps shows a weakness in Military ID technology. Things like Doppler shift ID might improve this a bit in the future or may have already (I have been out of this line of work for a while now things change). Anyway that's how it went down.

DDT

[re-geeked]

This was supposed to save all our crops, AND protect us against disease! Some folks were even advocating adding it to drinking water, IIRC.

This one was so bad, it almost single-handedly started the environmental movement, as its evils were rooted out in Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring".