The light bulb, chain reactions, lessons on safety

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I took a couple aviation classes in high school so many years ago but
remembered learning about a phenomenon that occurs when you make one
error you end up making a bunch of errors as a result of the first
error. For example the infamous landing gear light bulb that went out
on a major passenger airplane and effectively crashed the plane. And
it all started with failing to check if the bulb was broken. Instead
the pilots assumed the landing gear wasn't working and so on and so
forth.My teacher and the videos had called this phenomenon something
that I'd never heard and I'm pretty sure it is only used among the
aviation community. Now my question, finally. What is the aviator's
name of that phenomenon?

-- Jonathan Curtis, July 13, 2014

Answers

The "accident chain".

-- Philip Greenspun, August 12, 2014