Aviation Failures as A Life Lesson
 

If you've ever read Crichton's excellent book Airframe, you know that he, by way of his real search with commercial pilots and the NTSB, makes the thesis that commercial airplane crashes are almost always the result of multiple failures together leading to a crash

A good example is the early 767 that just ran out of full crossing Canada. If the entry below is to be believed, at least a half dozen factors had to come together for that plane to lose both engines. Bad pilot instructions, bad mathematical calculations, bad cockpit gauges, incomplete instructional material, incomes maintenance and so on. All had to be there for that (near) disaster to occur, and if not for the pilot (and his off-hours glider hobby - just like Sully!) nearly 70 lives would have been lost.

Gimli Glider - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But it seems to me that Crichton's assertion is relevant in so many other areas of life too.

For example, in my own business career, very seldom have I worried about chain reactions like the sort I mentioned. Usually I remain concerned about solo concepts etc. but in reality, whether you are discussing aviation, business, engineering or even social settings/relationships, I suspect that the things that truly bite us in the ass seldom happen alone. The trick for me, I think, is to try to focus on the interrelatedness of things and what can happen if they all go south, rather than the simpler strategy of just looking at issues as if they stand alone. I suspect if I honestly focus on the larger problems I've encountered in my 51 years, many could have been avoided or lessened if I had done so.

That - or maybe everyone else just "got" that at an earlier age than I...

I actually have that book in hardcover no less, I'll have to go back and re-read it.

There are nearly always event chains that lead to an incident or accident in aviation, and for that matter, basically all facets of life. Recognizing events that COULD possibly lead to unintended consequences applies universally. Think about it.

I think this is generally called a "comedy of errors."

Check out Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Fascinating stuff on plane crashes.

It's called Swiss cheese.

Like a row of slices of Swiss cheese. It's unlikely the holes (mistakes) will line up; but sometimes they do.

I've learnt more about stopping human errors in the Intensive Care Unit from air crash reports than I have from the formal medical literature (such as it is).

And that's actually pretty sad.

Burn: on top of many other factors, Canada had recently switched to the metric system, and this was their first 767 purchased after the switch. Add to that a malfunctioning fuel montiroing system and many other factors... They just ran out of gas and glided into an abandoned air force base (which was being used for amateur racing at that moment!)

actually all of Crichton's books involve a series of bad incidents acting in concert and amplifying to reach a catastrophic result. And I agree, most things in life are like that. It rarely is ever one single thing. Chaos theory does not get enough play in school.

Yeah, I suppose I was late to the party in coming to recognize the interconnectedness of things. It has been so easy throughout life to think "Why me?" or "Where the hell did that come from?" when in reality much what might be called "bad" could probably have been prevented if I'd just put the pieces together and had seen my role in it.

My $.02 anyways...

In my previous job, I was excellent at anticipating failures and addressing them long before they were realized. It's too bad all the recognition seem to go to the people that f'ed up big time and then had to very publicly fix them quickly.

At the 1996 Porsche Parade the autocross was held at the Miami, OK airport. The city closed the airport for the 4 days we needed to set up and run the autocross. We were right in the middle of running and some jet jock decided he wanted to land there so he declared an emergency. We stopped everything and cleared off the runway. He landed and we went back to running. A while later the jet was ready to leave and we told him tough, we are busy. We we be done in a couple of days.

He blew a gasket and called every politician possible. They all told him the same thing, we owned that airport for the week and it was closed until we were finished.

Yea, they learned a life lesson in Miami, OK.