Not at all; on pretty much every flight it’s a given that one or more of the flight crew will get sucked out through the windshield. Not sure why they’re making a big deal out of this particular incident.
There have been a few cases of windshields cracking over the years, but catastrophic failure/decompression incidents are pretty rare.
Random mechanical failures do happen; good design and maintenance can make them very rare, but it can’t possibly eliminate them. The fact that you regard it as “strange” (i.e. very rare and without immediately obvious cause) is a solid indication that, overall, the engineers and mechanics are doing a good job. Whether they did a good job in this particular case remains to be seen.
It’s entirely possible that it was a material flaw rather than a maintenance failure. To steal a quote from The Breakfast Club: “It’s an imperfect world - screws fall out.”
The design may be perfect, the installation may be done exactly, it may be operated in accordance with guidelines, and the material may fail because of an imperfection that was missed during manufacture. Stuff happens - that’s life. I’m not being cold or cynical - it’s just and acknowledgement that you can do everything right and still have things go wrong.
Indeed. Since one of the underlying causes of the 1990 incident was this flawed design, one would hope that an Airbus built 20 years later dd not have the same issue. Although given the Airbus first went into production in 1994, I don’t know whether its design team would have reacted to the 1992 report - more likely they just avoided the issue in any case as a matter of best practice. In my rather uninformed opinion.
