Brown Bag: Human As Hazard And Hero: What Malaysia 370 And The Miracle On The Hudson Teach Us About The Role Of The Pilot In Air Safety --Christine Negroni

Human as Hazard and Hero: What Malaysia 370 And The Miracle On the Hudson Teach Us About the Role of the Pilot in Air Safety

Christine Negroni

The goal of every air accident investigation is to learn from what went wrong and correct it.  There is no shortage of lessons to learn. A century of mishaps has turned commercial air travel into one of the safest modes of transport.

Often forgotten in the search for what went wrong is a focused effort to find out what went right. Human as hazard is a well-known phenomenon but human as hero is still considered an aberration.

Christine Negroni, author of the just published book, The Crash Detectives, examines six near disasters and compares the pilots to see what qualities made them resilient concluding that even with increasingly sophisticated machines, the role of the pilots remains essential.

Christine Negroni writes about aviation safety for The New York Times, ABC News, Air & Space, Airways and other publications. She writes the blog, Flying Lessons and is the author of two books, The Crash Detectives Penguin 2016 and Deadly Departure HarperCollins 2000. Find her at christinenegroni.com.