Failure.si
The AI guide to history's great engineering failures and what they taught us
Every safety standard exists because something failed first. Learn the real stories behind the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Challenger disaster, and other landmark engineering failures - and the analysis methods engineers use to make sure they don't repeat.
No card required · $9/mo Plus · $99/mo Premium
What you get
Everything Failure.si gives you
⚙️
Case study library
The real technical story behind history's most studied engineering failures.
🔍
Root cause methods
How engineers formally trace a failure back to its true cause.
📋
What changed after
The codes, standards, and design practices each disaster produced.
🔖
Saved study threads
Sign in free and keep every conversation for later reference.
Go deeper
Engineering failures and their lessons
Real case studies of how and why major engineering failures happened, and what they changed.
Structural failures
- Tacoma Narrows Bridge — Collapsed November 7, 1940, from wind-driven aeroelastic flutter engineers hadn't accounted for.
- Hyatt Regency walkway collapse — A 1981 Kansas City design change killed 114 when two suspended walkways fell.
- I-35W Mississippi bridge collapse — A 2007 Minneapolis bridge failed due to undersized gusset plates, killing 13.
Aerospace and mechanical
- Challenger disaster — Space shuttle Challenger broke apart January 28, 1986, from an O-ring seal failing in cold weather.
- Columbia disaster — Space shuttle Columbia was destroyed in 2003 by foam-strike damage to its wing during launch.
- Boeing 737 MAX — Faulty MCAS software contributed to two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, grounding the fleet.
Analysis methods
- Root cause analysis — A structured process for tracing a failure back through contributing causes to its origin.
- FMEA — Failure Mode and Effects Analysis: systematically ranking how a design could fail before it's built.
- Swiss cheese model — James Reason's model showing accidents happen when multiple independent safeguards all fail at once.
Pricing
Simple plans that grow with you
Most popular
Plus
$9/mo
- ✓200 questions per day
- ✓Full saved conversation history
- ✓Root-cause-analysis walkthroughs
Premium
$99/mo
- ✓Unlimited questions
- ✓Extended deep-dive answers
- ✓Everything in Plus