One Tool Saves Time and Lives
And it’s so mundane, you might not bother
In late May, 1999, my Arkansas-based client called to postpone our session, scheduled for the following week. It completely threw my metric (billable client-facing days) for the week, and that of a colleague who was scheduled to support the site visit. I fumed and held a grudge right up to the day the site audit would have started. My colleague called me on June 2nd.
“Have you seen the news?”
I hadn’t. I was making busy in my home office and sulking over the situation. We would have arrived in Arkansas from Austin through Dallas the night before and been onsite on this morning.
“Our plane crashed.”
All accidents are preventable
One June 1, 1999 at 11:50PM central time, American Airlines 1420 overran the runway on landing at Little Rock Airport. The plane hit several obstacles on the ground before coming to a stop and catching on fire. The pilot and several passengers were killed.
There were several factors that contributed to the accident — as is often the case when anything goes terribly wrong. Among them, the Before Landing Checklist was not fully executed.
