Airplane Propeller-Induced Flutter

One night in September 1959, a Lockheed Electra L-188A turboprop aircraft with 28 passengers and 6 crew apparently disintegrated mid-flight over Buffalo, Texas. The Electra was new at the time, the first large turboprop airliner built by a United States aircraft company ...

By |2023-02-22T09:15:23-06:00April 29th, 2021|Friday Famous Failures|8 Comments

The DuPont Buffalo Plant Explosion

It should have been a day of routine maintenance on November 9, 2010 at the DuPont plant in North Tonawanda, New York. Tank 1, which normally contained 10,000-gallons of polyvinyl fluoride (PVF), a slurry used in manufactured countertops, had been cleaned and inspected in preparation for repairs ...

By |2023-02-22T09:15:26-06:00March 25th, 2021|Friday Famous Failures|7 Comments