The Flying Circus of Trust and Safety

Ordinary events do not bespeak a Competency Crisis.

Watching disaster documentaries is a hobby of mine. One of the categories I am most interested in is airplane crash and close-call documentaries, mostly because the mechanics of how airplanes crash or recover is fascinating. One of the most annoying trends to surface lately is the “competency crisis” cult, which is on the verge of transforming into the safety cult. Basically, there is a tendency to blame every single thing that goes wrong in complex systems on the “competency crisis.”

An airplane is indeed a complex machine, but as with any machine, there are tolerance levels at which they are expected to operate. Like anything operating at a big scale, there will always be problems. Somewhere, someone is in danger on an airplane right now because that is simply the mathematical reality of millions of people flying through the air per day. By some estimates, there are literally more human beings in the air right now than there were in some ancient cities or entire civilizations.