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Fred W Scott Jr's avatar

Impressive thinking. Great article.

My own experience as an aviator of 57 years and leading/following various corporate and nonprofit entities suggests that there are MANY places which could benefit from the aviation mindset: “what went wrong?” It’s far more frequent to observe (and I try to avoid) the accusatory and much less useful “whose fault was it?”

Al Ueltschi founded FlightSafety Aviator simulator training as is well known. Less well known are the various Marine Safety and Nuclear Safety simulator training. Similarly, medicine is learning from aviation. Read “Josie’s Story”. The author is a good friend’s daughter. I was invited to hear her speak to the UVA medical teams. Her message: “stop blaming people and start fixing broken systems that allow failure to creep in”. Exactly as we look at aviation issues, there’s almost always a “accident chain” of events preceding a tragedy.

I can’t think of an industry that wouldn’t benefit from adopting What Went Wrong (Lets Fix it).

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Jack Wells's avatar

This is all correct, as far as it goes, but it’s incomplete. While the NTSB is mentioned, the FAA is not discussed, and the post gives the impression that the aviation community has organized this tremendous improvement in safety mostly on its own. The role of the government in achieving this improvement in safety is largely ignored.

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