Success Through Failure

A well-know historian of technology, Henry Petroski, has made the focus of his work how failures in technology can lead to success--ultimately a superior technology. We are now right around the 30th anniversary of the crash of an Air Florida plane in Washington, DC, which killed 77 people. The crash was caused by a variety of problems, but the main issue was inadequate deicing of the plane, which was attempting to takeoff during a snow storm. The Washington Post has a piece describing all the procedures that are in place now which make a similar accident very unlikely. Most of them are not very glamorous--things like checklists, better deicing solutions, and better defined procedures, but they work well. As far as I can tell, the last fatal accident of a major jetliner in the United States was over 10 years ago. (There was a crash of a commuter turbo-prop three years ago.) The history of technology often focuses on the major inventions, when small incremental changes can be very significant as well.