Airline Near Misses

Guest: Peter Madsen, PhD, Associate Professor of Organizational Leadership and Strategy at BYU  Taking a commercial flight is safer today than it’s ever been. Does that mean that no one in the crew made a mistake on that last flight you slept through? Of course not. According to organizational leadership expert Peter Madsen, potentially hazardous mistakes happen on 68% of commercial flights. Since so few of those mistakes end up causing any arm, Madsen says it’s easy—too easy—for airlines and crewmembers to get complacent about their own skill and the strength of their safety procedures.