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Unfortunately, in 1954, midflight for no apparent reason, killing 56 people total. In retrospect, the name 'Comet' was a bad choice. Although it was superior to de Havilland's first choice, the 'Murder Bird.' The Laughably Simple Flaw: It had square windows. This is one of those things that is easy to miss (the designers missed it, for instance) but easy to understand once it's explained.

50 Problem-Solving Activities That Link Math to Key Events in U. Staff for thinking of me and for giving me the opportunity to take a crack at this topic. DeLuna lnterior design by Kevin Callahan lnterior illustrations by Moffitt Cecil.

Here's a Kit Kat style candy bar. Where would you say this thing is most likely to break when pressure is applied? Along the willpower line, probably. Well, a square window is made up of four 90-degree notches cut out of your wall, creating four of these weak points.

You don't need a diagram -- if you have brick or stucco on your house, go outside and look. You'll find cracks there, protruding right from one of those sharp corners: Getty To fix, place head in bucket of sand and hum loudly. In engineering, that sharp corner (or groove in the Kit Kat) is called a ',' a spot where the shape of the object makes it more likely to break under stress.

You don't want the red bit. So if you're an airplane maker, how the hell do you fix that? Well, have you ever noticed how on every plane you've ever been on, the windows you look out of have rounded corners? Those curves are pretty much the only thing keeping the plane from tearing itself apart in midair like in that scene from Fight Club.

It distributes the stress to all of the various points along the rounded curve, rather than on that one sharp corner, which otherwise would (as they found out) tend to pull apart and form a crack over time. Trust us, this was not easy to figure out. Experts had no idea why the planes weren't holding together until they tested the structure by simulating the repeated pressurization of the cabin. Sure enough, the fuselage eventually burst like a bootleg condom, and the break started with cracks right at those window corners. Getty / Top: Safe and enjoyable ride.

Bottom: Explosive Caesarean section. But there was another problem. The Laughably Simple Flaw: Here's what the earlier carriers looked like. Couldn't be simpler, right? It's a floating runway.

How else would you design it? Well, that design was kind of a suicide factory. As you can see, planes waiting to take off sit at the other end of the runway you're trying to land on. If you don't get stopped in time, you're going to create one hell of a fireball. Free download driver sony vaio e series. Sachse 100 etudes pdf converter. And getting stopped in time was no small thing -- catching the arresting wire (the thing that stopped the plane) was a tricky business. Eventually carriers went with the cartoon-logic solution and installed to stop planes if they missed all the wires.