Aircraft Engineered with Failure in Mind May Last Longer

New design approach tailors planes to fly in the face of likely failures

Complex systems inhabit a “gray world” of partial failures: While a system may continue to operate as a whole, bits and pieces inevitably degrade. Over time, these small failures can add up to a single catastrophic failure, incapacitating the system.

“Think about your car,” says Olivier de Weck, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT. “Most of the things are working, but maybe your right rearview mirror is cracked, and maybe one of the cylinders in your engine isn’t working well, and your left taillight is out. The reality is that many, many real-world systems have partial failures.”

This is no less the case for aircraft. De Weck says it’s not uncommon that, from time to time, a plane’s sensors may short-circuit, or its rudders may fail to respond: “And then the question is, in that partially failed state, how will the system perform?”

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Back to the Future

I recall seeing many years ago an illustration of a jet liner where the passenger compartments could be let go from the fuselage to parachute to a safe landing in the event of looming unrecoverable aircraft failure at high enough altitude. Has technology advanced enough to where such a design has become economically practical?

Interesting article

I like this article, but would like to highlight a flip-side to the story.

Yes, adding back-up systems from a "what could go wrong" stand point of view will increase the likely-hood that a product will keep it's required minimum functioning and safety. For instance a car's power steering failure, does not mean you cannot steer anymore, it just gets heavier but allows you to use it until you stop safely.

However, the downside is also the human side => "Don't fix it if it aint broken". If a system can easily keep functioning without repair, the need or will of repair will become less. People will decide that the 90% functional system is still good enough. So the claim that increasing back-up systems will increase safety, cannot be necessarily true.

In that sense, my take for the average product like an airplane or car would be => For every failure that will impact basic/minimum safe running conditions of the product, needs a single back-up. Everything else is luxury and wasted in my opinion.

The only exception is where operation of the product dictates system will fail and not basic but high level of functioning is needed after failure. This would for example be for military aircraft (A-10 a nice of example of something build to last a big load of ground-fire).

What is your opinion of this?