Purely by luck. If there was a kid in the seat next to that door, it'd probably have been a fatal outcome. :(

Good validation of the 'fail early' strategy. If the door came off when they were higher up it would have been worse.

However, this failure seems to have not followed a strategy; the result was just luck.

Pretty sure there we zero deaths the first few times MCAS failed.

A near miss taken seriously today is a fatality avoided tomorrow.