Learning from Disaster - Ian Hughes - NDC Melbourne 2022

In 2019 more than 4.5 billion passengers were carried on 43 million commercial scheduled flights.

Airlines connect our world and provide one of the cheapest and safest modes of transportation available. But when things go wrong, they go spectacularly wrong. Plane crashes provoke a morbid fascination for people; piquing our curiosity imagining the terror that must have ensued.

In this session we'll look at air crashes that changed the industry, how airlines and global regulating bodies made sure they never happened again, and what lessons we in IT can learn from them.

Check out more of our featured speakers and talks at

[SohnoZ]

38:30 The analogy of: You're not stuck in traffic, you ARE traffic" is absolutely great.
It does not only describe what goes wrong in business culture, but also politics, ecology, etc.
"The system is wrong". Well, you are the system. One part of it, same as you're one car making up traffic. I hope more people realize that.

[johnmcleodvii]

I believe you missed a nuance on the 447 disaster. The initial warning after the autopilot turned off was an over speed warning. The correct reaction to an over speed is to cut throttles and pitch up. Later when pitch down was attempted, the stall warning sounded. When pitch up was requested, the plane slowed past what the computer considered too slow to be flying and the stall warning turned off. Software was at least partly to blame in this one.

[johnmcleodvii]

On the Quantas flight, my suspicion would be a race condition in a multi threaded application.

[revfry]

I heard this first airline crash talk from someone else.

[RoamingAdhocrat]

bit unfair to describe Melbourne as a disaster