Danger looms when your tech team sounds resolute and certain about their impending release–lack of doubt isn’t a sign of high morale, it’s a huge red flag.
When the pilots of Air Astana Flight 1388 taxied down the runway after routine maintenance, the repairs to the aircraft had been verified at least seven times by different experts–but no one noticed in any of those checks that control cables had been installed backwards, so commanding the aircraft to turn left made it turn right and vice versa. In fact, the mechanics were so sure the plane was working correctly that when a test computer gave a critical warning, they replaced the computer rather than even considering that the error might be real. Unsurprisingly, the flight was a terrifying series of wild swings and dives, barely kept aloft by heroic pilots and a team of mechanics on board as passengers, who debugged the problem in the air while being battered by high-G turns. The whole adventure is worth reading (spoiler: they just barely managed to land safely) but the lesson for those who work with software or any other complex system is that teams who are about to crash don’t sound uncertain, they look confident.
(Hat tip to my co-author Jeffrey Fredrick for first pointing out to me that “being wrong feels just like being right”!)
This first appeared in my weekly Squirrel Squadron email, which goes out every Monday, and was originally posted on 31st October 2022. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com