I was reading in Outliers - besides other nice subjects – 4 interesting things about plane crashes:
- in a typical plane crash, the weather is poor. Not very bad, but sufficient enough, so that the pilots are more stressed than usual
- in a tremendous number of cases, the flight is behind schedule so the pilots are in a hurry
- in 52% of the cases, the pilot is awake for 12 hours or more – this means he’s tired and can’t think sharply
- in 44% of the cases, the pilot and copilot have never flown together before, so they are not very comfortable one with each other.
Well, this doesn’t mean that if outside is starting to rain and the flight has a 10 minutes delay, things are about to get nasty. Or if the two pilots aren’t Facebook friends, they’re gonna crash this thing in the first cliff. Each of this factor, taken isolated, has almost 0 effect. But when all these factors come up simultaneously + human errors than can occur – all these can cause a chain reaction which can lead to a not very happy scenario. Theoretically.
I should chill and stop talking nonsense, taking into account that I have 4 flights in the next month, but I found really captivating the way Malcolm Gladwell was analyzing this thing. I warmly recommend you The Tipping Point and Outliers. Next year, I plan to read his latest 2 books: Blink and What the dog saw.
