Apollo 13

by Jim Lovell

Fellows, these are just systems, and if you’re not honest with yourself about what went wrong, you ain’t gonna be able to fix anything.”

cataclysmic accidents in any kind of craft are almost never caused by one catastrophic equipment failure; rather, they are inevitably the result of a series of separate, far smaller failures, none of which could do any real harm by themselves, but all of which, taken together, can be more than enough to slap even the most experienced pilot out of the sky.

Inexplicably, the engineers neglected to change the specifications on the thermostat switches, leaving the old 28-volt switches in the new 65-volt heaters. Beech technicians, North American technicians, and NASA technicians all reviewed Beech’s work, but nobody discovered the discrepancy.