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The Culture Lab
What Can A Plane Crash Teach You About Keeping Your Team On Course?
In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, one of the key characters, Mike Campbell, is asked:
“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Gradually, then suddenly
On 28 November 1979, Air New Zealand Flight 901 took off on a sightseeing flight of Antarctica. The whole plane was the first-class cabin. 227 passengers on board enjoyed drinks, conversations, and breathtaking landscapes. The cockpit door was often open, and passengers could chat with the flight crew. Everyone was taking photographs and filming out of the cabin windows. The atmosphere was festive and relaxed.
Before lunch that was to include a choice of chicken Souvaroff, prawns, scallops, steak, and peach Erebus for dessert, Captain Jim Collins flew two large loops through the clouds. He wanted to bring the plane down to about 2,000ft (610m) to offer his passengers an even better view.
This is when, suddenly, the proximity alarms went off. At that point, Captain Collins must have realized that what he thought to be clouds and swaths of ice in the distance was something else entirely. With no time to pull up, the plane plowed straight into a gigantic mass. None of the 227 passengers and 30 crew members survived the crash.
We will never know if Captain Collins had time to realize that what suddenly appeared right in front of his cockpit was Mount Erebus, the second-highest volcano in Antarctica. What we do know is that, unbeknownst to him, his aircraft was gradually approaching the volcano from the time the plane took off from Auckland Airport at 8:15 am. That is 4 hours of cruising towards disaster.
How was that even possible with an experienced crew and modern aviation tools?
The main reason was a 2-degree shift in the coordinates of the flight made by the ground crew the night before. Captain Collins was not informed of the change. While he thought he was flying towards McMurdo Sound, his plane was gradually being re-routed to a path toward Mount Erebus. And then, it was too late to course-correct.
This is how most…
