Nigelh,
The thing I learned from that one (was that the squirrel next to the loch?) was that you need to go along to your friendly avionics engineer (if such a thing exists...) and get him to make up a length of cord about 3" long with a fresh set of plugs at each end. This creates a weak link that will detach regardless of the direction it is pulled.
Very handy for vacating an airframe in a hurry, but do make sure you've got enough length or a coil cable so you can lean out the door, very annoying to have to plug it back in with a load on the line.....
Knievel,
While it's true that you can get a failure of any kind, at any time, most passenger ops are conducted outside DennisK's "extra caution area", giving the opportunity to make us of our superior aviating skills to avoid needing what automotive engineers call "passive safety devices". This doesn't mean it can't go wrong, incredibly quickly, but the opportunity is there.
The operations that have sparked my research are those where there is limited opportunity to practice superior aviating skills and where, if any of us manage to find some, they would most likely serve to reduce, rather than avoid, the use of the "passive" equipment.