Case Study - Aviation crashes

Whenever any activity is conducted, it could be on a scale of running an entire country, a global pandemic or an individual project or hobby; failure will always be part of it. Any responsible manager or leader would consider it their duty to conduct a retrospective analysis to see what lessons could be learnt from the activity. This if done correctly will give the opportunity for reflection and improving future activities which may have similar parameters. However, when it comes to failure, many entities have a tendency of ‘sweeping under the rug’ and move on.

By actually conducting an autopsy, we can gain insightful and exceptional knowledge about the steps that led to the failure. What must be remembered during this exercise is to refrain from blaming though. This does not mean that there should be no consequences, however for true dissemination of what went wrong we need to completely remove the ‘blame game’ and approach the issue analytically and systematically.

Chicago: 1944 - Annex 13.

Aviation is the most safest mode of transport for decades with an exceptionally low failure rate. True, when things fail, they are sensationalised on the TV, in the media and twitter is full of hashtags. Yet statistically speaking aviation is the safest mode of travel on the planet. But have you considered why? Prior to 1940s, there were hundreds of deaths per annum due to plane crashes. At that time, the press would regularly prey on the risks of flying and anxiety and nervousness in passengers was increasing. At the same time the world was becoming more global and air travel was increasing. In order to address this paradoxical trend, to improve the safety of air travel and assure the general public in its safety, the who’s who of aviation industry came together in Chicago in 1944. They discussed how the industry can collectively learn from disasters and failures. The result was a very important Annex 13 which created a common form for incident reports. Not only was the ‘lessons learnt’ normalised, these reports were to be in public domain and shared in the entire community. The industry experts would now be able to learn from previous mistakes even when the mistake would have been by some other company or competitor. This was a defining moment in the aviation industry. Every crash thereafter was thoroughly investigated and the findings was then reflected across the industry. The dramatic reduction in deaths is remarkable. Even when you consider that actually air travel has increased exponentially since.