How to not kill people
summary
Compares aviation safety to software and AI with concrete takeaways: aviation averages about 270 deaths per year and still treats every incident (Habsheim 1988: A320 stall, three deaths; American Airlines 191 1979: engine separation) as a forensic lesson. Recommends concrete practices: use flight recorders as logs (raw plus intermediate machine decisions), enforce crew resource management and psychological safety, add layered mitigations (checklists, simulators, circuit breakers, backpressure), and keep static typing guardrails and monitoring to catch metric/imperial and other surprising failure modes.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction to aviation safety
- 3:13Engineering responsibility
- 7:20Risk and mitigation
- 10:34System design and redundancy
- 13:08Economics and risk
- 16:13Monitoring and transparency
- 21:17Logging and incident analysis
- 24:25Culture and communication
- 28:57Normalization of deviance
- 32:16System stability
- 36:18Guardrails and conclusion
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