This feature will bring you some famous and not-so-famous examples of Engineering Disasters in an effort to help you learn more about what to do and not to do to minimize the chances of failure. We'll start by giving you some basic information on engineering disasters and learning from failure...

"The role of the engineer is to respond to a need by building or creating something along a certain set of guidelines (or specifications) which performs a given function. Just as importantly, that device, plan or creation should perform its function without fail. Everything, however, must eventually fail (in some way) to perform its given function with a sought after level of performance. Hence, the engineer must struggle to design in such a way as to avoid failure, and, more importantly, catastrophic failure which could result in loss of property, damage to the environment of the user of that technology, and possibly injury or loss of life. Through analysis and study of engineering disasters, modern engineering designers can learn what not to do and how to create designs with less of a chance of failure."
Gary Halada, SUNY Stony Brook

So, we admit that failure is inevitable, even necessary to make improvements in some cases - we want less of a chance of failure especially catastrophic failure that might be termed a "disaster".

How do we qualify a disaster? It is interesting to note that in the U.S. in 1992 there were a similar number of transportation fatalities involving airplanes (775), trains (755) and bicycles (722) - yet most of us would probably say that we feel safer on our bikes than we do in an airplane. This has to do with something called "perceived risk" - increased fear because one airline accident can involve a large number of fatalities and is highly publicized.