In May 1996, ValuJet Flight 592 crashed into the Florida Everglades six minutes after takeoff from Miami, killing all 110 people on board. Investigators traced the fire to chemical oxygen generators loaded into the forward cargo hold without safety caps on their firing pins. What they could not trace was a single point of failure, because there was not one.

We work through the layered collapse William Langewiesche documented in his landmark 1998 Atlantic article: work orders written in language the mechanics could not parse, safety caps that did not exist anywhere in the shop, paperwork signed off on work that was never done, a shipping clerk who put quotation marks around the word "Empty" on the manifest, and a copilot who recognized what he was looking at and said nothing. Drawing on Charles Perrow's theory of the normal accident ...