Forty five years ago, on this day, December 28, 1978, things go wrong.
With the crew investigating a problem with the landing gear, United Airlines Flight 173 runs out of fuel and crashes in Portland, Oregon, killing 10. As a result, United Airlines instituted the industry’s first crew resource management program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 335ppm. As of 2023 it is 421ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that there had been other recent airline disasters which were ultimately down to to crews failing to do the smart thing. My favourite is the Tenerife KLM PanAm disaster caused by an arrogant Dutch guy – but broader systemic breakdown and bad habits was behind it of course, it always is.
What I think we can learn from this
it was these disasters that got the aircraft manufacturers and the State and the insurers together and insist that the way that pilots and crews interacted was the subject of better training. So you get crew resource management and notechs- the non-technical aspects. This would be a huge boon for social movement organizations but they just can’t get their heads around this stuff…
What happened next
Crew Resource Management became a thing. Aviation by the 90s had become absurdly safe, once the hijacking and blowing up aspect got taken care of.
Even with the 737 disasters and the icy pilots, if you look at the number of flights and number of passengers vs actual loss of life from commercial aviation it is absolutely safe now. Pity about the planet, but you can’t have everything…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..
References
Gawande, A. The checklist manifesto