This is a real incident which clearly shows an impact of small thing.

Well the incident I’am about to relate here isn’t as historically dramatic as the Apollo Mission, but it has always struck me as how the Achilles heel of any system is not in its most complicated components but in it simplest ones.
October 2nd 1996.

Soon after taking off from Lima, Peru pilots of Aeroperu Flight 603 noticed something strange. Their flight instruments were not working properly. The aircraft in question was this.

Image Credit – Wikipedia.com
A Boeing 757 which was almost 4 years old. It was a dark, stormy  night over the Pacific Ocean when the airplane’s instruments began to tell the pilots that first, they were going too slow, and then too fast. In addition to this, their altimeters (instruments telling them how high they were off the ground) failed, leading the crew to disregard their readings. The pilots immediately declared an emergency and turned back to Lima. Out of the airport another aircraft took off to meet the stricken 757 and guide it in.
Flying over water at night in stormy weather is extremely hazardous. With no external references such as landmarks and a visible horizon a pilot has no way of knowing whether his airplane is climbing or descending. The artificial horizon on all aircraft is meant to be used in such situations in order to maintain steady and level flight

Image Credit – http://www.code7770.com
Unfortunately, with a slew of instrument errors in the cockpit the pilots had no choice but to disregard its information as well. Unknown to them, the aircraft was slowly sinking into the sea.

The first warning that the pilots had of their true altitude was when the left wing of the 757 struck the ocean.

Image Credit – http://www.code7770.com
They tried mightily to regain control, but failed. Aeroperu 603 crashed off the Peruvian coast with 70 souls on board. 9 bodies were found floating. The rest sank with the airliner.

After the wreckage was recovered the cause of the crash was not very difficult to pin down. Duct tape had been left over the openings on the airplane which sampled the airflow outside and provided inputs for the instruments in the cockpit. The duct tape was slapped on when routine maintenance was being performed. Although it was supposed to have been removed before flight, it was never taken off. While it did not render all the instruments useless, it left enough of them unusable to make the pilots distrust the rest.

Image Credit – http://www.code7770.com
And there you have it. A strip of tape approximately 100 square centimeters in area brought down a modern jet airliner  with the loss of 70 lives. Small thing, big impact wouldn’t you say?

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