Final report on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in-flight exit door plug separation

Part of me wonders if the plug could be designed such that it's obvious when the bolts are missing. Would this have happened if it were impossible to assemble without them, or if it were easy to verify their presence?

Maybe it doesn't matter if a better design is possible - if adequate procedures exist and weren't followed, and oversight fails to catch instances of that, then anything could go wrong.

The general principle would be making other parts with interference fit such that it or they visibly do not align without properly tightening/attaching parts below/about them. For example, the door plug should not sit in the correct position unless door plug bolts are all tightened and untightened door plug bolts shouldn't allow installing other parts like trim pieces to be flush.

Every critical step should be as "idiot-proof" as possible, until better idiots are created who hammer structural parts into position to meet management-mandated arbitrary deadlines.

I don't know if you were joking about the hammer or referring to a Russian assembly worker who used a hammer to install accelerometers in a rocket into a wrong position which caused it to attempt to fly downwards (no people were injured) [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-M#Notable_launch_failur...