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November 12, 2009

What Saved Flight 1549?

From the Times comes this review of the new book “Fly by Wire,” in which William Langewiesche argues that the true hero of Flight 1549, which plopped down safely in the Hudson River last January, was not the plane’s pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, but the engineers who designed the “fly-by-wire” system that stabilizes and aids the flight of many commercial airplanes, including the Airbus 320 flown by Sullenberger that particular day. (Langewiesche originally wrote about this in an article for Vanity Fair.)

As it happens, Atul Gawande told a similar story with a different conclusion in his talk at the New Yorker Festival last month (you can watch video of the entire talk). In Gawande’s telling, what kept Flight 1549 from disaster after its engines failed was not any particular human effort but, instead, Sullenberger and his crew’s admirable adherence to their safety and emergency procedures. While acknowledging that the fly-by-wire system worked to keep the plane from stalling and simply falling out of the sky, Gawande argued the greatest factor contributing to the success of Flight 1549 was the use of a checklist.

Standardized and centralized checklists, Gawande said, allow human beings engaged in complex tasks to greatly reduce errors and inefficiencies. His larger argument during the talk (which he also made in this magazine in 2007) was that doctors and hospitals could greatly improve care and reduce costs if they adopted the kinds of checklists developed and used in other modern industries. Construction first moved toward a checklist system a century ago, with the development of skyscrapers, when structures became so complex no single person could master every part of the building process. Airlines began taking them seriously in the nineteen-seventies, when crashes became a problem. Gawande emphasized that the part of Flight 1549 that seemed most unusual to him occurred before take off, when Sullenberger and his crew, following their checklist, went through the steps they would take if the engines happened to fail in flight. Moments later, they were able to instantly call back those steps, in the air, when it mattered.

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