[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.