There's a story I use in training about how the Harrier had some tape on the wing that had a ridge (wrinkle) that was .020" tall. That ridge along the wing was causing unexpected movement in the aircraft. Shut down the whole fleet of aircraft.
And technically someone landed a F-15 with one wing, the portside wing was litterally cut off right along the air intake in a mid air collision with a F-16 during a BFM exercise. But still...
Don't ever say something wrong about duct tape !!! Spoiler: Don't forget That duct tape is the force. It has a dark side and a bright side and it stuck all the pieces in the universe together.
A mate used to be an electronics engineer at QANTAS. He had a roll of "thousand mph tape" that they used on aircraft. Sometimes an indicator light on the exterior would blow, but wasn't crucial for flight (takeoff or landing, either) and they didn't have the part (but the home base did) so they'd just pull the part and tape the hole, and send it on home. It was basically thick metal foil with superglue on one side. He eventually used to to cover a hole in his car's muffler.
Trains are so much safer sounding, I mean, you don't hear about trains that are just slapped together from any old scrap and duct tape then used way beyond projected service lives, why, that'd be insane and oh dear god no.
Hey, I travelled on Northern Fail Pacers daily for two years between Leeds and Pudsey and the train only set on fire once!
High speed chunks of metal are usually extremely dangerous regardless of how they are pieced together or the surface they traverse. Still better than walking long distances, tho.
Actually, now I think about it the train that set on fire was a Sprinter, not a Pacer, which means it was probably only *checks notes* slightly over 30 years old.
My family's car for my entire childhood was a horrifying abomination with the chassis of a Ford Thames 300 with no inside paneling, the drivetrain and engine of a soviet Lada, the windows of a bus, and god only knows what other bits and bobs. The whole thing was held together with arc welds though, so it was actually pretty solid.
Well, moving from "insecure" planes to cars... I would never trust a car built between ~1998 and 2005. During my studies my group of friends and I (just a random bunch of nerds playing with car automation and microcontrollers) found out a *huge* bug in the protocol most of the car makers are using (CAN bus). At first we of course thought we got something wrong and that we were doing some weird shit provoking dangerous behaviour. It was kind of funny though: under certain conditions, the signal to brake was hidden/overriden by the signal to turn the lights on. And it was even possible to modify the braking command "live" to make it look like a lights off command - though much harder. We exposed this to our teachers in order to understand what we did wrong. After a few weeks/months it appeared that we did everything right and were facing a real CAN bus limitation / design flaw! We contacted Bosch (owner of the protcol), they told us they were already aware of this, and that it was fixed a couple of years before. Still some vehicles are using the deprecated/buggy version as it was long before connected cars and live updates. :D
To travel 100% safely, it's recommended that you stay at home. There's still danger, but it's not travel-related danger.
You know, 4 times I started typing a sentence to try and give some context for this, or even an explanaition of how I felt after seeing it, but... Just... What the hell was the brainstorming session like for this shit? "Kids like dinosaurs right? So we'll rip off Jurassic Park! But lets add cats and dogs. Space cats and dogs! And dogfights in space, 'cause there's a joke there. But there's still dinosaurs - can't forget that! So, there's a magic bone that controls the universe, 'cause dinosaurs turned into skeletons, yeah?"
Quite interesting to think that the choice of not traveling at that time would be what got you killed in that case.
