[wearsshoes]

“That system, although it has undergone radical changes, is still similar in several key ways. So similar, in fact, that in 2017 the Boeing 737 MAX 8 could be produced with an egregious design flaw, kept hidden from the FAA, which resulted in two preventable crashes at unready airlines in developing countries, killing (coincidentally) 346 people. And so, while it is true that flying today is much safer than it was in 1974 — passengers today need not worry about their planes crashing because of badly designed doors — the same basic factors that led to the DC-10 cargo door saga still exist and still cause accidents.“

Kyra might have to sadly walk even the caveat on this one back after yesterday’s incident on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 (another 737 MAX), which had an in-flight decompression emergency in which a body panel blew out due to some defect related to an unused doorframe obscured behind the paneling in that section. Thankfully it didn’t crash, but if the panel had hit some control surface on its way off of the plane, it might have been a much less happy story.

[yawpitch]

Not sure the caveat ever made sense… the next full hull loss due to a badly designed door is, really, always just a matter of time + financial incentives + regulatory gaps.

And, since we now know (after Asiana 8124) that an untrained and motivated individual can open the damned things in the most critical phases of flight, ejecting a exit slide into the path of an engine in the act, I’m not sure a caveat for even what we’d currently call well-designed doors is reasonable.

[mannykannot]

There's probably an unavoidable element of trade-off in the design of a door which normally must not open, yet must do so in a wide variety of abnormal situations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_door#Spacecraft

[yawpitch]

Sure… and you shouldn’t feel particularly safe sitting beside any such door, especially if there’s an astronaut that really wants to exit the craft between you and it, if it’s got a failure state that lets it open in any situation in which it normally must not open.

[mannykannot]

Putting aside the low probability sitting next to an astronaut who if in any frame of mind, if it turns out that the problem with this door plug is also manifest in emergency exit doors, then yes, there are grounds for concern.

[polishdude20]

That door that fell off in the Alaskan Airlines flight the other day are plug-type doors. They're not actually doors with handles and passengers aren't able to open them.

[yawpitch]

I wasn’t implying that this blank plug was passenger operable… my implication is that now humanity knows that that the non-blank plug doors that do have handles can be opened in the critical descent and ascent phases (due to insufficient pressure differential) the caveat doesn’t mean much.

And it doesn’t… you can be killed by a poorly designed blanking plug (it’s just sheer luck no one died in the Alaska incident) or by a properly designed door operated at the right time of flight by someone with either delusional or malicious intent.