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A Survivor’s Journey: Safety Lessons from the Miracle on the Hudson with Dave Sanderson

A Survivor's Journey: Safety Lessons from the Miracle on the Hudson

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In this unforgettable episode of The Safety Guru, we’re joined by Dave Sanderson, a survivor of US Airways Flight 1549, widely known as The Miracle on the Hudson. Dave takes us behind the scenes of that extraordinary day in 2009, when the plane crash-landed into the freezing Hudson River and every passenger made it out alive. He shares what it truly means to step up under pressure and help others stay safe in urgent, high-stakes situations. Through his gripping firsthand account, Dave shares life-saving safety lessons and emphasizes the power of clear communication, leading with intention, and practical strategies for managing your mind under pressure. He explains why casual leads to casualty, emphasizing that pattern recognition, quick decision-making, situational awareness, and decisive action can make all the difference when every second counts. Tune in to gain powerful lessons learned from the Miracle on the Hudson and pivotal insights that extend far beyond the cabin of an aircraft.

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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Dave Sanderson. He was a last passenger on the Miracle of the Hudson. He’s an author of four books and also a publisher of a magazine called Moments. Dave, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me.

Eric, thank you for having me today.

Let’s start with your background and how you got into the plane, essentially, the Miracle in the Hudson.

Well, thank you very much. Yes, for over 37 years, I was a sales producer for many different companies. You’re in sales and you travel a lot. That year, in 2009, 2008, I was with a company by the name of Oracle. I was in charge of what’s called consumer packaged goods in the Southeast. I was working with companies who made things, distributed things, and retail things. That the week happened during the Miracle on the Hudson, it was the end of a three-day business trip because we started in Florida early that week on Tuesday. That Wednesday, we worked in a manufacturing plant in Petersburg, Virginia. Then we went to New York City because the next day, we were working in Brooklyn at a distribution center. Now, I don’t know if anybody here has ever been or even worked inside of a distribution center, but they always open up very early because the trucks need to get going for their shipment. We were doing systems checks that day on the third day of that trip. We got in there early because we wanted to see how all this stuff was working. We started our day about five o’clock, so we got done about 10: 00.

I was excited because I gave me the opportunity to go home early because my traditional strategy because in business, you never know how things are going to shake out during the day, was always book the last flight out.

Being there many times.

Yeah. But now I get a chance to go home early. I called her Travel agent, worked with her, and she put me on US Airways flight 1549, the Miracle of the Hudson. I wasn’t supposed to be on that flight. That’s how I got on the plane that day. I gave up a first-class seat at five o’clock, received 15A on flight 1549 on January 15th.

Tell me a little bit about that experience. Obviously, it’s well known in terms of what happened on the Miracle of the Hudson, but maybe walk me through the early few minutes, and we’ll then get to some of the main the lessons that you took from it.

Sure. Thank you. I think a lot of people, not most of you know the public story of what happened. But there is a private story. There’s a back story, too. I always tell people the back story is usually more interesting than the real story. On my case, I was in C15A. When I heard the explosion, I never heard anything on a plane like that before. That woke me up because, Kaylee, I wasn’t paying attention. I tell people I was not paying attention. I didn’t know where those exits were, read the brochures, never pay attention to the flight. I didn’t because I knew everything.

You’ve done it many times.

Yeah, it flies a lot, no big deal. But then when I heard the explosion, I looked out the window because I was in a window seat. I saw fire coming out of the left wing. So, I knew something had happened. But when you fly a Swad, Eric and I were talking about, you used to travel a lot. Likewise, planes lose engines. There are always at least two engines on a plane.

Yeah, I’ve had multiple times single bird strike, not multiple times dual.

No big deal, right? Got another engine. We’re going to go back. I’m not getting home early, but at least we’re going back. That’s what made this one of the most amazing things is because that double bird strike took out both engines at the exact same second. I tell people one of the amazing things about that experience is we all heard this one explosion. Because I believe, it might be my belief, and other people might have different beliefs, we would have heard boom, boom. Then you’re over New York City, you may have a I have a different opinion on what’s going on. I think everybody is like, okay, we’re just going to go back to the airport. But as we started banking, I looked out the window and the skyline of Manhattan was right out my window. I had never seen that version of the skyline. I mean, I was right there. We were about to going down at the highest building. We were going right by. I’m like, wow, never seen this one before. Then I looked out the window a little bit, see where we’re going. All of a sudden, all I see was water and a bridge.

I’m like, never seen that one before. No. Those two things are starting to wake me up a little bit. I was like, okay, something’s going on that I wasn’t aware of. And then that’s when you hear the only words the captain said all day, this is your captain, Brace for Impact. And when you hear the word, Brace for Impact, you know something’s going on. That’s something you never heard on a plane, unless something’s going to happen pretty quickly. So that’s the one who really got my attention. I think everybody else’s attention, likewise.

And so, you went above and beyond that day because you were the last passenger, 15 A, is very close to the emergency exit over wing. Tell me a little bit about what happened because you did some pretty heroic things on that day.

Well, thank you. I think everybody really stepped up. I tell people, one of the things I grew up playing sports and athletics. When in sports, going into a game, we always had a game plan. We always had a game plan. My thought was, once I knew what was going on, once he said those words, If I survive this, which Dylan didn’t know whether we’re going to survive it or not, but if I do, I better have a game plan to get the heck out of here. My game plan was aisle up out. I’ve known with all my training; I was head of security for Tony Robbins for over 10 years. He was one of my mentors. I had proximity. I learned all these things. Now I’m putting him into practice. Because one of the things he teaches about, you say it enough in your head, writing grains in your body. I ended up saying, aisle up out, up, aisle up, aisle up, aisle up, in my head. So, if that moment came, I was ready to execute. So now we crash land. And the captain says he was roughly 120, 125 miles an hour when we hit.

That’s how hard it hit it was. So, it was a jarring hit. And I went back to my seat and up in my seat. And then I came up and I opened my eyes. I saw a light at the window, so I knew I had a shot. But now you’re the real problem start. Now you got water coming in this plane, and it’s rushing into this plane. Where I was, it was about knee deep already. As soon as I looked down, it was knee deep. But now you got to go. Then the picture most people remember, Eric, is the people standing on the wings. You always say, how did that happen so quick? Well, one of the greatest lessons out of this, and I think part of being in, we talk about safety, is if you’re working in safety, you have to get resourceful. You have to be resourceful. I think that was one of the greatest lessons that came out of this. Because what happened was when I saw people walking down in the seats to get out of the plane, that gave me a new metaphor, a new lesson. It’s like, when you think you only have one way to get something done, aisle.

That was the only aisle. That That’s the only thing I thought about was aisle, right? Ail up out, right? Right. All of a sudden, you see other people doing other things to get resourceful very quickly. When you get resourceful, other options and choices come into play. Sure. So, it lessens the risk. But now, it wasn’t my game plan. My game plan was aisle up out. I got to the aisle. Okay, now I’ve executed point one. I got to the aisle, now I’m going up and out. But when that happened, something changed that moment for me because when I hit the aisle, all of a sudden in the back of my head, I heard my mom start talking to me. My mom passed away in 1997, but there was something she would tell me when I was a kid. It just all of a sudden, I heard her tell me, it’s like, if you do the right thing, God will take care of you. The right thing for me was you take care of other people first. Sure. Because at that moment, I knew I was okay. I was alive, but is anybody in the back of the plane alive?

Instead of going up and out, I climbed over the seats to go towards the back of the plane. I got to the back of the plane. Things were moving pretty well. People were moving because water back there is about chest level deep.

Yeah, because it was slipping.

See, the angle you don’t see, right? You don’t see is the plane is actually like this. It’s not like this. It’s like this. The impact of the plane is underwater. I got behind the last person. And the impact, if you saw the plane impacted the Hudson River, it was a backside. It hit first, which took the brunt of the impact, which meant the bins had broken open, which means the luggage is floating in the water. You got to remember, look at the timing of this. This is approximately 3: 27 to 3: 30 in the afternoon on January 15th, when all this is breaking loose. Late afternoon, New York winters. It means it’s getting dark. So now you got darkness, water, loggie’s, a whole bunch of things. So, I got behind the last person, and I was just making my way out. And I looked at the right, I got to 10: 00 F. Like, Man, I am out of here. There’s light, there’s a door, I am out. And then I started to get out the door like everybody else, and I looked up, and there was no room on that wing for me.

And there was no room on the boat. So that’s why I was in the plane for seven minutes, way steep in 36-degree water. But people are already being rescued just a couple of minutes. That’s what part All part of the miracle. The first response was we’re there. But now you got to manage… There’s a lot of things you got to manage now. You got to manage your mind. You got to manage other people’s minds and states. Because what happened at that point, a couple of minutes later, I looked out the wing and something caught my eye. It was a lady, and she just wasn’t moving. She wasn’t moving. Now, all the training that I’ve had when I was in a security, primarily with Tony, is when you have somebody in that state of mind where they’re just shocked, they don’t know what to do, they don’t do anything, you got to do something to break them out of that shock because now you got to move quick. I mean, you got people stay on a wing, it’s 36 degrees water, it’s 11 degrees air temperature, and you’re not moving, and that means everybody behind you is not moving.

All I did was yell at her. I had to break her, so I started yelling at her. I got her attention. Somebody grabbed her arm and pulled her on the lifeboat. All of a sudden, you see people walking down a wing. When we talk about safety and risk and things like that. When you find somebody that state of mind, especially when you’re in a situation where you have to do something. I mean, in business, it happens all the time. I’ve been in a means where people just get stalled because they don’t know what to do. The way the world is moving right now, Eric, is so fast. You have to be able to make a decision and go. If you’re not doing that, you’d be able to help somebody be able to do that quickly because it could not only cost time and money, potentially somebody’s health. That’s what was going on the right side of the plane because another part of the equation that doesn’t get talked about, we talked about the back story. The flight attendant who was supposed to manage that door at 10F got injured. She had a piece of metal slicing her leg.

She went up at the first class exit on the left. The right side of the plane had to be managed by people like me who had zero training.

Sure.

I had no training on how to manage a board during a plane crash, which gives you another point of reference that you don’t have to know everything about something. But if you can lead people and you can influence people and you can give direction, and most importantly, give certainty in uncertain times. That’s when you become a leader, and that’s when you become a leader. That’s how you manage the risk of a situation, as you have somebody who can step up and give certainty to people in uncertain times. I think that’s what I was able to do. All I was able to give certainty because I had to manage a door, which I had no experience in doing that. I didn’t go to school for that, right. But it doesn’t matter. One of the lessons learned, Eric, is in a leadership, when you get in a situation, step up and lead. Just step up and lead. Give certainty to people because the person with the most certainty in uncertain times is the leader. It doesn’t have to be the CEO. It could be the janitor. If that janitor is giving you certainty to be able to do what you need to do, you’re going to look to that person.

Now, you’re the leader, and they’re looking for you to manage the risk of what’s going on.

Right. So, let’s capture some of those key lessons from the event. You just started by saying, Leader to step up. Tell me about some of the big takeaway lessons you took from this event.

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Yeah, there’s so many lessons. I mean, there’s communication lessons that I talk about being able to communicate effectively. I’ll even use the example of the captain. All he said is, this is your captain, Brice for Impact. He didn’t go along with big, long soliloquy about, this is what’s going on, and there’s a river. He said exactly what he had to do in the most succinct way. As a leader, in stepping up, you have to be able to communicate effectively, succinctly to people. That’s one of the big lessons that came out of this. One of the big lessons that came out. It was later on. One of the opportunities when I get to speak around the world, I got invited to speak at NASA’s Safety Day at Kate Fina.

Now, to me, that was one of the biggest experiences of my life because I grew up in the ’60s, where space was everything, man. I mean, these guys are going to the moon. They shut down class to watch these space launches. I mean, it was amazing, right? Sure. Nasa asked me to be their keynote speaker on Safety Day. There’s a negotiation that goes on, and normally that negotiation is money. For me, it wasn’t money. I want to be an astronaut for a day. They gave me a little bit of money to basically cover my expenses. But the agreement was, after I get done speaking, Dave’s going to be an astronaut for the afternoon.

Sounds fun.

I did three talks for all the three shifts. I did all the three talks. Now it’s time for Dave to be an astronaut. The first stop we Eric, was in a room at Cape Canaveral. It’s a sacred room with the remains of the space shuttle Columbia. That’s the space shuttle that went down with the teacher, Mr. McAuliffe. There’s one person who basically owns that room. The first stop was to really understand, look at that situation, how does something like this happen? Well, we get there, and the gentleman who owns that room wanted to talk to me about my experience, and I wanted to talk to him about this experience. But he said something to me, which was obvious I’m eye-opening, and I tell this story every time I speak because it’s so powerful about safety. He looked at me and said, Listen, he said, If Apollo 1 doesn’t happen, we don’t go to the moon. Now, I don’t know if anybody here remembers Apollo 1. I’m old enough to remember it. It’s when the three astronauts burned up on Apollo 1 in testing. At first, I was like, I don’t understand. What do you mean?

He goes, Listen, you got to remember, in the ’60s, everybody loved us. We had more money we knew what to do with. We could do anything. We got casual. That casual is led to casualty. Instead, if this happens out in outer space, we don’t go to the moon. They stop it. We don’t go to the moon. When he said casuals leads to casualties, Eric, I’m like, this is brilliant. When it comes to managing risk and safety, this is it right here. You cannot be casual with anything because if you go back, I don’t know if anybody remembers Columbia, but it was all about the O-ring. The O-ring. They forgot to check on the O-ring, which caused the explosion, which caused everything else. It’s not casual again. In your business and in life, let’s think if you can’t get casual with your money because what happens? You go broke. You can get casual with the way your health is. You get overweight or even worse. If you get casual with your clients. What happens? They go someplace else. Part of safety and risk is You got to be able to not be casual with anything.

That was one of the greatest lessons. When you’re looking at the things you’re doing in your world, ask yourself, are you being casual? Is it I’m just going through the motions? Or is this, Do I have intention? Do I have an intention My attention is when you lower the risk and hopefully improve the safety. Another thing I learned, and it happened on the miracle on the Hudson, and it’s happened ever since, this process saved lives. What I mean by that is you better have a process, a game plan, everything. That day, the captain, the first officer, went through their checklist. Now, the first officer gets all the credit because he had to take that book of thousands of pages and get it down to, okay, what do we have to do? The must, right? Yeah. The must. The first officer, I give Jeff Skiles all the credit for that. The captain gets all the credit for getting it down. Skiles gets your credit for doing the process.

Sure.

And the flight crew had a process. Likewise, he all manned their doors except the one we were at because she got injured. We’re still in business in life. If you have a process how to manage your money, you have a process for your relationship with your wife or spouse. You better have a game plan. So, when I go into something, like I mentioned, I’m going to have to speak here three times in the next five days, I’ve got a game plan for every one of these. I’ve got a little book over here, and I still have a book where I write down my game plan. Because I understand process saves lives. Process saves lives. That’s absolutely the one. I’ll leave you with one of the last ones. I had the opportunity years ago to escort a guy by the name of General Norman Swartz off when I was in it. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around a four-star general. It’s very intimidating. I’m sure. This dude won a war in 69 days, man. The guy has actually done it, right? A lot of people talk the big game. He’s actually done the big game, right?

I have 40 minutes of transporting him, and I had an opportunity to… You don’t talk to a four-star gentleman, but I ask him a couple of questions. One of the questions he told me, it was the difference between being a manager and a leader. It was something I remember this day. This is going back to 2000 when this happened, right? For 2011, 2000. He said, Listen, remember this, 5 plus 15 is greater than 15 plus 5. I’m sitting there going, I don’t get it. He goes, Listen. He goes; he’s not talking military terms. I’m going to talk military terms. He said, as a general, I’ve got my colonels, right? The way I do my thing, if I’m a general or a leader, I’m going to give the mission to somebody and give them five. They can ask me anything they want, but then they’ve got to figure out how the game plan is. He says, But the difference between a general lieutenant, lieutenant will say, Give people. Here’s the mission. This is how I want it done. This is when it’s got to be done, where it’s got to be done. They’ll give people five minutes to ask them questions.

They’ll tell them how to do it because that’s the difference. If you’re a leader, you give If you give them the mission. They can always come to you, right? Right. But if you give them the mission, they are responsible and accountable to get it done, right? They’ll put it in their game on how it’s done, get it done. Where a manager or a lieutenant will tell you exactly everything how they want it done because it’s all about them.

Sure.

So, 5 plus 15 is greater than 15 plus 5. One of the greatest lessons I learned about you from General Normal Score golf that day. There’s a lot of lessons like this that I’ve learned. It helped me not only grow, but also, like I talk about a lot, you heard me say this, manage my risk. Right. Manage risk. And as a leader, I want to help people manage risk, right?

And so, I love your example, the casual leads to casualty. I remember when we first spoke, you also talked about high velocity decision making and some of the elements around pattern recognition. Tell me a little bit more because I thought those were also quite interesting.

Yeah. And that’s one of the things I talk about. Being able to make decisions quickly Because like we talked about, the world’s moving so quick right now. The competitive advantage we all have is speed is your competitive advantage. You got to be able to make a decision. See, most people can’t make a decision because they don’t want it. They’re afraid to make the wrong decision. Then if you see these leaders are out there now, these innovators, these entrepreneurs, I mean, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, they made decisions and just went with them. Because what they understand is this, and I truly believe this, you only got to be 80% of it right. And if you find out, you go out and drive something that doesn’t work, you try it again, you try it again. Where then you look at a company like a Boeing who’s very slow and pedantic because they don’t want to make a mistake, and they never get anything done. They never get anything done. So, remember, be able to make a decision. I think it was one of the greatest lessons my mom and dad taught me. When we were kids, I have not been as good as my kids as my mom and dad were with me.  

Because my mom and dad always made all their kids make a decision, and you had consequences. So, you learn how to make a decision and then bounce back. So, speed is your competitive advantage. And the next thing we talk about, we talk about is pattern recognition, because the skillset that leaders are looking for now, it was really two skillsets we’re looking for. Creativity, right? They want somebody who’s creative. Give me something different. Give me something unique. And as Tony told me, what he looks for in a leader is the ability to anticipate. See where this before it’s going. And that’s why he actually chose me as a head of security, because he saw me in action, how I can anticipate. How do you anticipate? There’s a lot of ways to learn how to anticipate. But the one thing, very easy one is doing it through modalities, visually, auditory, kinaesthetically. If you can understand how somebody communicates either visually, through auditory or through kinaesthetically, you can anticipate the next thing they’re going to actually do. I learned that trick because as you’re in security and you’re looking at people and watching patterns of people, and you can see if there are they listening or are they watching or are they really into themselves kinaesthetically, you can anticipate how they’re going to respond to things.

When I’m working with somebody, one of the first things I do is understand what modality you reside in so I can anticipate how I’m going to be able to communicate with you most effectively. The ability to anticipate, I think, is a key, and do that through pattern recognition.

Last but not least, you talked about how to manage risk. You also talk about when you speak to audiences, how you manage your mind. Tell me a little bit more on that.

Yeah, managing your mind, it all starts with that. That’s what happened that day on the Miracle in the Hudson. The people always say, were people screaming and losing? I’m like, No. The term I used that day with Katie Kedrick on CBS News was, it was controlled chaos, where things were happening really quick, but no one lost it. The way I learned, and I implemented that day, and I think the captain did the same thing, is through the managing one, three ways how you manage this, how you manage your mind. Through your physiology, how you conduct your body, through the words you say to yourself, and third, what you focus on. If you want to manage how to manage your mind, you do one or three of these things. The fastest way is way to move your body because that changes the way your whole body reacts. But when you’re on a plane going down a plane crash, you don’t get up and jump up and down and get your body going. So, I had to actually do it through the words I said to myself and the questions. I asked myself different questions to keep my mind.

Like I said, I’ll up out, I’ll up out. I had to ask myself to keep my mind in asking different things. Now, the captain, on the other hand, he said this publicly, so it’s public knowledge. He had to focus. I’ve heard him say this, and I even ask him this question once. It’s like, were you praying when you were going to the night? 140, 54 other people praying for me. He had to focus. All There’s three ways to manage your mind. Through your physiology, the words you say to yourself, your internal dialog, as they would say, and/or what you focus on. You can change your state of how you go about things immediately doing one of those three things. That’s what happened that day on the plane, and that’s how leaders do it. They immediately be able to go use whatever technique they’re going to use. You might see a batterer going up to the batterer plane. All they’re doing is using physiology to get themselves in the state they’re hit, right? Sure. Or in football, where they’re banging each other on the shoulder pads, right? So, everybody’s got a pattern, all right? You got a pattern.

Is your physiology? Is yours the way you talk to yourself, internal dialog, or is it how you focus. If you understand how, you can turn yourself on and put yourself in the right state, you go in that right state, you can accomplish anything. Because it comes down to one thing, Eric, and we’ll leave with this. If you have a strategy, you can do anything. See, what I try to do is help people understand strategies. That’s what I try to do through these things we talked about, pattern, regulation. If I can help somebody build a strategy, we can get your outcome. This is what I do. I coach people and I work with companies. All I need to know is what your outcome is, and I can show you how to get the strategy on how to do that because you’re not the first person to ever do it.

Right. Phenomenal story, great learnings and takeaways from the American Hudson, and also your Cape Canaveral story. I think very good, powerful lessons because I like your casual leads to casualty. I think that is very visible at NASA, but in many other organizations as well when you start getting too casual of things. You speak to a lot of different audiences. Tell me a little bit more about your speaking as well as how somebody could reach out to you.

Well, thank you. I have the opportunity. I’m very blessed to not only speak at many companies, but I speak at a lot of safety days, as you can talk about, I’ve done Exxon, BP Mobile, Novelis, PG&E out West Coast. And the reason why is because I can relate a situation where safety and risk management had to be maintained, but in a chaotic situation. So that’s something I do. I’m very honored this year, Eric. I’m actually producing my own event in Charlotte in November, where I’m really actually taking people to two days, teaching them all these things, going deep into this. Because what I talk about now is what I really focused on, because it happened the day after the miracle on the Hudson, is I figured the day after the miracle on the Hudson that I did not have freedom of time. My company owned my time. I didn’t have freedom of money. They were capping my money. I didn’t have freedom of mission because I was working for somebody else’s mission. Sure. And I didn’t have freedom of relationships because my boss asked me to go to Michigan now next week. He didn’t even care I went through a plane crash.

What? He didn’t care. So not that the company didn’t care, but he didn’t care. So, I knew I didn’t have those four freedoms. And I truly believe everyone who’s listening to this, and you and me, we all want those four things, freedom of time, money, relationships, and mission. So, this is what I do to help people. So, everything we’re talking about today, I’m very blessed to be able in November, November 13th and 14th, be able to… I’m reducing my first event to show people how to do this. Live in a person, and we’re actually going to do a fire walk, too. So, if you’re a little afraid to do this, we’re going to show you how to break through that fear by doing a fire walk. So that’s… You just go out to Dave Sanderson on LinkedIn, check it out. And we’d be honored for you to come with us in November because it’s going to be a heck of an event.

Excellent. So, Dave Sanderson on LinkedIn.

Thank you. Yeah, very easy.

Thank you so much for sharing your story. Thank you on that day for going above and beyond in terms of trying to make sure everybody got out safely on an event that started out as a normal day, as you said, and turned into something that had never been experienced before.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dave Sanderson is a nationally recognized leadership speaker, accomplished author, and inspirational survivor of what is known as “The Miracle on the Hudson.” As the last passenger off US Airways Flight 1549, which had to ditch into the river, he took the lessons he learned from that profound experience in the frigid water and emerged from the wreckage with a mission to encourage others to do the right thing and share coping skills to address any adversity they may face.

Dave is now convinced that everyone has their own defining moment, whether it be personal or professional, but that most people don’t know how to take that first step to find opportunities out of their own uncertainty. He now travels the globe on a personal mission to share his life lessons, show the importance of not only setting goals but also achieving them, and share his passion for helping others who are longing for connection and community. So many people don’t have a mentor or their own “board of directors,” so Dave now works with people of all ages to help them decide what their personal “life” brand will look like going forward.

Named one of Inc.com’s Top 100 Leadership speakers, Dave travels the world to share his inspirational leadership lessons and has raised over $14.8M USD for the American Red Cross over the last ten years through his talks.

He lives in Charlotte, NC, with Terri, his wife of 37 years, and has four children who were very happy their father came home that day.

For more information: https://davesandersonspeaks.com/

Contact information: [email protected]

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Soaring Safely: Insights from Above the Wings to Ground Safety with Emma Henderson

Soaring Safely: Insights from Above the Wings to Ground Safety

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Drawing from her extensive experience as an airline captain, Emma Henderson joins the show to share her pivotal insights from “Above the Wings to Ground Safety,” illustrating how other industries can effectively apply key aviation safety elements. She recounts the inspiring story behind Project Wingman Foundation, highlighting its profound impact and lessons learned. Emma emphasizes the importance of peer support, civility, and an organizational culture of learning in fostering a safe culture. Join us for this engaging episode to discover how you can elevate safety in your industry. 

READ THE EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Emma Henderson, MBE, and a former airline captain. Emma, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me. Let’s get started with a little bit about your background. What I didn’t realize was the number of female captains is actually much lower than I ever expected. Why don’t we start there?

Why not? Well, hi, Eric. It’s lovely to be here and thank you for having me. Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people are often shocked to find out that there are fewer than 500 female airline captains in the world, which is actually four times fewer female airline captains than there are endangered Bengal tigers, which is…

Oh, wow. Tell me a bit about your story in terms of your journey to become a captain. Now you’re doing a lot of work sharing a lot of wonderful work that has happened in aviation safety and bringing it to other industries, including health care.

Absolutely. I saw the space shuttle come into land on the back of a Boeing 747 when I was 10 years old at Stansted Airport in the UK. It was a huge event. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to see it, fly over London and then land at Stansted. It was massive. And my parents, we didn’t live very far from Stansted, so my parents took me to see it, and I looked up and thought, that’s amazing. I want to fly one of those. And I wasn’t talking about the Boeing. I was talking about the space shuttle. So, I decided there and then that a 10-year-old me was going to be an astronaut, which was great, except that I didn’t know. I thought I’d have to become an American citizen in order to be able to be an astronaut. And remember that 10-year-old me was in 1983, so I didn’t have an Internet. I had Encyclopedia Britannica and whatever other encyclopedias and books I could my hands on. So, I basically didn’t really know how to even become a pilot. I knew I wanted to fly. So, because I don’t come from an aviation background at all, it was actually a bit of a roundabout route into flying because I actually went off to university to study history with a view to becoming a lawyer.

I was going to go do a law conversion and go the back door into law. While I was at university, I discovered something that we have in the UK called the University Squadron. So, it’s a volunteer reserve branch of the Royal Air Force. And universities across the country are affiliated to squadrons that are at bases throughout the country also. And they teach people to fly. And when I was doing that, it was learning to fly on something called a Bulldog. And now they use something called Grabs. So, Prince William was on a University Air Squadron, and he learned to fly in a grab in Lincolnshire. So, a friend of mine was actually one of his instructors. Sorry, it wasn’t in Lincolnshire. He was at St Andrews, so he would have been part of that University Air Squadron. But there’s a single engine, twin-seater, quite nifty little aircraft, actually. And I spent a couple of years doing that and decided then I was going to be a Harrier pilot because my feet were too small for the black flying boots that you get issued when you’re an air crew. So, they gave me brown Harrier boots, or brown flying boots, and that what Harrier pilots were.

So, I decided it was a sign, and I’m a Harrier pilot. But the slight curveball was that on the first night that I was down at R. F. Finningley to do my flying training, which we went every weekend from university, I wore it. A girl walked into a bar and met a guy. And we’ve been married for 29 years at the end of this month. So that was the curveball that I met my now husband. And six months later We got engaged. The year after that, we got married. And we literally lived happily ever after, which is really annoying for people, but it’s the truth. But that was what I thought of flying to an end again because I didn’t enjoy in the Air Force. It was actually another eight years before I was then living. We moved to New Zealand, and I took up flying again. I came back as a fully qualified commercial airline pilot, as you do.

When you go to New Zealand. 

Yeah, it was very normal for military exchange wives to go on exchange and come back with a professional qualification. That’s how I got there.

MBE, what does it stand for those that are not British and aren’t aware of the MBE? Tell me a little bit about that and the rarity of that order.

Well, MBE means I’m a member of the Order of the British Empire. It goes back to days of your and nights and things like that. I’m not a night. I don’t have a sword or anything, but basically, it’s an honors system, and there are grades of honors. So, you can be made a member of the Order of the British Empire for outstanding service. It might be something like the arts or music or charity. And so, I was made MBE for my charity work with Project Wingman, which I have no doubt we’ll speak about in a moment. But there are several different grades and going right from member to OBE, which is an officer and then commander and night. And then if you’re knighted, then you become a sir or a dame. And the MBE is the lowest of the honors. But it’s an incredible honor, because outside of the military, I only know one other person who has been made MBE. That’s quite an honor. Awarded by Prince Charles as he was then, now the King, and given It happened to me, actually, I was the last tranche of people to be given the award signed by Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Philip because it was the last honors that were given out before Prince Philip passed away.

It feels very special to me. Oh, wow.

Yes. Well, congratulations. We’re going to talk about aviation safety in a couple of stats because it’s always interesting to think about why we keep talking about aviation safety and what’s the link to safety in other industries. I pulled up some stats from the NTSB. Just the last 15 years, there have been three fatalities in commercial aviation. While there was 8 trillion miles flown, this is We see NTSB data, so in the US, zero midair collision since 1978, 20,000 planes in the air at any given point in time in US airspace. It’s not always been that way. When you look at data from in the 1960s and 1970s, there was somebody on average dying every second to third day. Obviously, you’re looking at multiple different collisions over a year and you’re dividing by the number of days. But it was very, very different. Now it’s taken a significant pivot. Contrast that with on the ground in the US as a fatality every 96 minutes that happens in industry. Light in day, but it’s not an industry that started this way always. It’s an industry that had its risk because it’s a very unforgiven environment to be flying but has done a lot from a safety standpoint.

I’d love to explore some of the themes that in your mind have made this possible. I know you share this with a lot of other industries, including healthcare, because I think there’s some great learnings there. But why don’t we talk to some of the key elements that you think have helped make this difference?

Well, I think the first thing is that it’s really important to emphasize how safe flying is because so many people are either They’re afraid of flying or uncomfortable with it in some way. And I work a lot with people who are scared of flying to help them to understand why they don’t need to be. And you’re absolutely right. It’s still the case that it’s more dangerous to drive to the airport than it is to take a flight. And I think the stats from the ’60s and ’70s, we’ve got to remember that aviation is still a really young industry. We’ve only had aviation for just over 100 years, which is not very long. And the technological and the technological advances that have been made, even actually, particularly in the last 10 or 20 years, are astonishing. And aviation learns from its mistakes in a way that other industries are starting to realize is really valuable. And the medical industry, the healthcare industry, has for some time actually been implementing ideas from the aviation industry because they’re both safety-related industries. If when you’re dealing with people and you’re dealing with people’s lives, you have to have your primary focus on safety.

So, there’s a lot of parallels between aviation and medicine. And I think the first thing is that technology has been put in place on aircraft, on the ground, and at airport in order to be able to make it safer. So, we can see things now that we were never able to see before. It’s safer for us to fly in fog, for example. Sure. There’s just more ability for us to be aware of everything that’s going on around us. I think that’s the first thing, the technology, but also knowing how to use it, because it’s all great having a singing, dancing system in place. But if the people who are operating it haven’t really got a scuba how it works, then there’s no point having it. So, training has advanced massively as well. And safety reporting, there’s a lot of data that’s been collected over the last… So, we’re going back to the 1980s, for example. So even over the last 45 years, there’s so much data that’s being collected, and almost everything on a checklist that a pilot uses in a flight deck is the result of an incident or accident that has caused injury or fatality. 

Almost everything. So, we learn from our mistakes, but we implement changes that are going to make a difference to improving safety really quickly and in a really meaningful way. I think that’s quite astonishing, having come out of aviation and into working with industry. You don’t see that everywhere. Maybe in medicine and the nuclear world, you might see that, but in a lot of other places, that just doesn’t happen. Right.

This element of learning culture is, I think, a big difference, and it goes to just culture, is there’s an expectation to report even fairly benign events, anything that went off course, essentially, that wasn’t expected, versus a lot of other industries, you don’t learn. You don’t have those opportunities to learn from things that could have gone wrong.

Absolutely. I think, in fact, in other industries, it’s quite the opposite. You still see a little bit of resistance to it in the airlines where people are saying, well, I don’t want to get found out. You think, well, you shouldn’t really be flying then. I would be expected to file a safety report for anything that was out of the ordinary. If it was significantly out of the ordinary, there’s even a button in an Airbus that you can push. So that when they look at all the flight data, they can see a red flag pop up. So, you can say an extraordinary event happened then, I’ll push the red button. So, when you analyze the data, you can find it quickly. So, there’s a lot of the data analysis happens all the time. Engines, for example, are monitored during a flight. I have in the past landed somewhere to find a message from somebody to say, there’s this going on with your engine. You can’t take the aircraft onto the next place. Because we’ve detected this. You think, wow, they did that before I was even on the ground without even looking because there’s so many sensors and aircraft are constantly talking to the ground as well.

There’s an element we talked about, which is also this very high standard that are set. There’s a professional orientation that gets you really embedded. That I think is something that also makes a big significant difference. Every pilot I’ve talked to, there’s really this sense of responsibility for passengers on board. There’s a very strong orientation around standards. You have a great story around when you became a captain on this.

I failed my first attempt at command, actually, and I talk about it very openly because in such a male-dominated culture, I think failure isn’t talked about enough. It certainly is not something that was talked about a lot when I failed my command. And the weight of responsibility that you have on your shoulders as a captain, you are responsible for the aircraft and everybody’s life on board that aircraft. So, for me, it would be 180 passengers plus six crew all in my hands. And that is a massive responsibility that you take very, very seriously and you train for it all the time. You’re not just a pilot when you’re at work. You’re a pilot when you’re driving to work and when you’re at parties and you’re thinking, well, actually, I’m flying in a couple of days’ time, so I’m not going to hit it really hard today. You’re always effectively thinking about work or at work. We’re just going to have to pause there, Eric, and you’re going to have to remind me story in particular we wanted to- This was a captain, I forget his name, that he said, do you have the highest standard?

I think. Oh, yes. You were on takeoff.

You need to pause for five seconds.

Yes.

So, when I was training for my command, there was a captain I was flying with, a fabulous guy called Gabriel, and we called him the angel Gabriel because he was just really lovely. He was a brilliant trainer and extremely talented as well. He was dual rated on different aircraft. He’s also a helicopter pilot. And he was doing something called a command assessment flight with me. And he said to me, we’ve taken off out of Stansted, and we were climbing up to, let’s say, for the sake of argument, 24,000 feet. And you have to read out. And there’s a readout that you have to do from the top of the screen so that you are basically announcing to the other pilot what thrust mode you’re in, what you’re expecting the aircraft to do, and what your stop altitude is. And so, I’d read that out, and Gabriel turned to me and he said, Emma, do you think you’ve got very high standards? And I said, Absolutely, 100 %, Gabriel, all the time. He said, okay, is that in everything you do? And I was thinking, where’s he going with this? I don’t. And I said, Yeah, absolutely.

I’m very confident to be able to say yes to that question. He said, but absolutely everything you do, you hold yourself to a really high standard. Yes, Gabriel, 100 % Where are you going with this story? And he said to me, okay, that’s really interesting, because what you’ve just read out is trust climb, climb, 390 blue. Yeah, that’s your 240 Blue where we’re going to. Absolutely, Gabriel. We said, Emma, the read out is, Thrust, climb, climb, flight level, 240 blue. And you didn’t say flight level. Actually, you’re not holding yourself to the standard. And I thought, God, you know what? He’s right. I had basically learned bad habits from people I’ve been flying with who just dropped the flight level words. And it might sound like a really small thing, but it really matters because it’s there for a reason. It’s there to make sure you don’t confuse other information with what you’re trying to get across. I think the easiest way to explain that is the fact I chose to use 24,000 feet for that illustration because you would say the words 2, 4, 0, blue. Does that mean you’re going 2, T, O, 4, 0, blue, which would be 4,000 feet, or does it mean 2, 4, 0?

That’s why you say flight level, and then everything after that has to be a number. That’s the reason for it. It was just It’s really interesting that I thought I helped myself to a really high standard. That’s what command assessment flights are for, to pick those things up. Of course, when I then went through my actual command, I made sure that I was setting the example all the time so that nobody sitting next to me could ever say, oh, well, Emma doesn’t do it, so I’m not going to bother either.

Sure. But this element of high standard also instills this professional orientation across in every role and every function in terms of you have to hold that high bar because it’s a very unforgiving environment once you’re up in the air.

Very much so. I think it’s like with everything. If you want to be known for something, you have to be it. If you want to be known as being a successful professional, you have to be a successful professional. If you want to be known as being a professional, you have to act like a professional. You have to dress like a professional. And it comes down even to that. There would be captains that would come into the crew room. It might have been quite fun to talk to in the crew but if they’re coming in with a messy tie and their shirt not tucked in and the stuff hanging out of their bag, it just gives you an impression of somebody who think, oh, that’s not what I was expecting, actually, of an airline captain. Are they as professional as their qualifications would need you to believe? Or do they let things slip in other areas as well? And there’s one person I can think of who absolutely the way they behaved in the crew room was the way they behaved in the aircraft. And they were They were a great hand flyer, but I didn’t ever think they were terribly safe.

I never enjoyed flying with them because I didn’t ever feel particularly confident in the way they were handling everything outside of the flight deck, because you’re not just there to operate the aircraft. You’re there to manage people and manage time and make decisions and all of those things as well.

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com

Com. Another item we touched on is civility, which is something I’ve not normally heard of when talking about civil aviation. But tell me a little bit about the element of civility that you brought up.

Well, the thing is that as part of CRM, so crew resource management, is there is always going to be a command gradient when you’ve got one more experienced pilot than the other. If you’ve got an environment, you’ve got to have an environment in the flight deck, but also on the whole aircraft, where everybody is able to feel safe saying the things they need to say. And it comes down to civility because it’s what it says on the tin. It’s just being polite and having manners, giving people that space to be able to speak up and say, actually, do you know what? I think we need to go on oxygen here because there’s a funny smell in the flight deck. And rather than shouting them down and saying, no, no, that’s absolutely not necessary. That’s down in communication. Stability allows people to break down barriers that make the world safer, make the flying world safer, make the medical world safer. And I find it quite bewildering that people have to be taught that, frankly, because I grew up in an environment where you listen to each other, even if you don’t like what the other person is saying, you still need to hear them out because it might just be that brand new first officer you’re flying with has only got 500 hours to their name, might actually be quite a lot sharper than me as a 51-year-old being around the block a little bit, flown for quite a long time, and still trying to look out for everything all the time, but I might have missed something.

If I don’t listen to that, and there’s no point having two people on a flight deck, and we need to keep two people on a flight deck for exactly that reason. They always say about they should let pilots fly with dogs, and the dog’s there to bite the pilot if it ever tries to touch anything. I don’t know if you’ve got that. Yes, I don’t think that’s happening. No, it’s just a fun joke about how pilots shouldn’t really be allowed to touch anything in a flight deck. It’s engineers, I think, largely that say things like that, to be fair. But because they’ve been engineered out of the flight deck, haven’t they? But I think that It’s interesting that civility is something that is being taught a lot in health care now. I would argue that it’s being covered in aviation to the point where when you go through your pilot training, there are points at which you’re told you’re the absolute best of the best, and there’s a risk of arrogance creeping in. But actually, the average cadet who comes onto the line in an airline, certainly in the UK, is extremely good at operating the aircraft, extremely good at finding their way around the manuals, and is very, very good at understanding that whilst they are very good at what they do, they don’t have any experience, and that they can learn much from the person they’re sitting next to. 

In medicine, I’m told by people who work in medicine, that still isn’t there because you’ve still got your very senior consultant anesthesia, for example, who couldn’t possibly learn something from a 22-year-old or 25-year-old that’s just come out of medical school. Actually, of course they could. We can always… The day I stop learning in aviation is the day I need to stop. As it happened, I stopped before that day came.

I think you bring the topic of health care, and you do a lot of your work in terms of bringing the concepts of aviation safety to health care. Tell me a little bit about how other industries can benefit from some of these concepts we’ve talked about.

Well, every other industry, to be honest with you, can benefit from the transferable skills and knowledge that comes from operating a flight deck because you’re in charge of a multimillion a pound machine, 180 people’s lives as almost as a minimum. If you’re flying transatlantic, then you’ve got a lot more people than that on board. We’re operating really complex systems, and you have to know how they all interact with each other, because it’s not just the case that if something stops working on an Airbus, the systems are all in triplicate. So, there’s always a backup, but it’s actually, if one system fails, how does that impact all the other systems that are around it? How do you make decisions when that happens? If you get a problem in a flight, are you actually going to turn back, or are you going to carry on, or are you going to divert? All of those decisions, and you’re making those decisions at 600 miles an hour, seven miles above the planet. So, you need to know how to do it. Actually, in aviation, we’re not just taught how to do that. We’re tested twice a year in our recurrent simulator checks.

We have line checks with training captains. It depends on the airline, but they’re usually annual. We have to renew our license every year to be able to continue to fly. We have to have a medical to be able to fly. All the working parts around walking onto an aircraft with your flight bag in your Ray-Bans and riding out in front of the passengers saying, Hey, it’s Captain Emma here today. All the moving parts around that are what makes the flight work successfully, not just because of the knowledge that you have as the captain, but because you know how to extract the things you need from the team that you’re with. And business can learn from that, and medicine can learn from that. Actually, as personal, private individuals, we can learn from that. Sure. Because it turns out, who knew that going back to caveman days, if we all work together, we survive for longer. It’s always been the case that if there’s somebody who wants to exclude themselves from the team, everything stops working. You can’t actually fly an aircraft on your own. You can fly a light aircraft on your own. But even then, you still have to have air traffic controllers and people to…

You can never really do anything significant on your own.

Correct. You mentioned at the beginning, Project Wingman. Tell me a little bit about what Project Wingman is.

Well, Project Wingman came as a candle lit up in the darkness of what happened in 2020. And so for us in the UK, and I know it’s different in other parts of the world, things happened at different times and in different ways. But as much as we went through March 2020, it became pretty obvious to me anyway, that something really significant was about to happen to our industry. And I was worried about it. I’m not going to lie. I wasn’t, by any means, last into the airline. I wasn’t worried that I was going to lose my job, particularly because I worked for a big European airline that’s still running, and I wasn’t last in. So if there were redundancies, I wasn’t concerned about that. But I could see, I describe it as a tidal wave of air washing across the world, and it felt like I was trapped. And at the same time, we were being told on the news that the NHS, which is the health system here in the UK, was about to face its biggest challenge ever. And I knew that obviously cabin crew, flight attendants have a lot of medical training in order to be able to do their job.

We have as pilots a lesser degree of training, but we still have to do some some first aid training. And it occurred to me that I was also as a peer mentor, the European Airlines have to have a peer support system. And I think most airlines in the US and Canada and around the world have them as well. And I was a peer support mentor, and I just realized that there was an opportunity if we were going to be grounded to help people who were about to face this big challenge. So, I spoke to the professor who oversaw the program at my airline, and he knew of someone else, another airline who was thinking along the same lines. So, we got together. This guy’s girlfriend worked for the NHS. So, we came up with this idea, which was to provide tea and empathy to NHS frontline staff. And the way we did that was to ask. We decided we were going to ask Air Crew if they would support this by coming in in uniform to go and serve teas and coffees and just be a listening ear to NHS staff when they were able to take a break.

Because lots of medical staff were going in to work for their shifts and not going home for five, six, seven days because They just didn’t get time. They were sleeping on the floors of hospitals. They didn’t have iPhone charges. It was hard for them to contact their families. And so, we just said, look, we’re going to wrap our arms around you, one safety related industry to another in your time of greatest need. So, he wrote the medical manuals, and I had this platform that I was able to use that I hadn’t realized I was going to need because I had been on an ITV documentary called Inside the Cockpit the year before, and I had become quite well known as Captain Emma, both within and out of the industry. So, I put a call out on… I just used all the social media platforms I had, including workplace, which was what we in my airline. And I just said, look, we’re going to go and help NHS staff. We want people in uniform to volunteer to go into your local hospital. We’ll coordinate it who’s in. And I set up a Gmail address. And after three days, I had 750 people who had signed up to help, which was more than I could manage to respond to and put on a spreadsheet.

That’s when the first friend came to help run what became the charity. And by the summer of 2020, we had six and a half thousand volunteers across the UK and America, but mostly in the UK. We had 104 lounges open in every nation of the UK, from right up in the north of Scotland, where I live, down to Devon in the south of England, and from Ireland across to East Anglia. We had two lounges in New York City, which was incredible. I never got to visit them. And one of these days I’d really like but people just signed up. It was like every second, almost. My phone was going, as people would sign up and say, I’d like to come and help. This is where I live. And we just said, look, let us know what your name is, what your phone number is, what your email is, where you live, or where you are, not necessarily where you live, where you are now, because some people realized that they were going into lockdown and went home to parents, which was really great, because actually, otherwise, all the constant concentration of people would be around the big airports.

And we had people in Wales that were able to run lounges, even not near an airport, because they had all gone home to stay with their parents for this lockdown. And that’s what we did. And we started off with a lounge at the Whittington Hospital in North London. And the next day, the Royal Free opened, and then the next day, another lounge, and another lounge, and another lounge. And then we moved outside of London, and it just spread like wildfire. It was It was incredible to see the number of people that were willing to get out of bed every day and put their uniforms on and do something they didn’t have to do for people they didn’t know at an unknown risk to them and for an indeterminate amount of time when they were facing their own challenges. It was phenomenal. I’ve never stopped being astonished by the reaction of people to that.

Well, that’s an incredible story. I didn’t realize the extent of the work that had happened with Project Wingman.

Well, no, I think that actually I don’t think I realized, to be honest with you, until probably the middle of 2021, when we had to change what we were doing slightly because we had started out going into physical hospital sites, and they needed their spaces back, and our crew went back to work. So, we bought a double-decker bus that we converted into a mobile wellbeing lounge. And then we bought another one. Our plan was to have six but actually, we ended up with two. And they toured the country doing the same thing, but with a lower requirement for staff and lower requirement for space being provided by the hospital. So, the charity has been running now for four and a half years. And we’re just taking a pause over this summer to work out what the next stage looks like, because it’s a great thing to have done. And it was brilliant for… It’s been brilliant for Air Crew. It’s been brilliant for the medical profession, and we’ve placed 2000 people who’ve left aviation and gone permanently to work for health care as a result of that experience. But the long-term solution for medical staff well-being can’t be a crew in uniform.

There has to be an in-house solution that we can potentially help to deliver, but they have to come up with their own solution. So, we’re just at the moment in the stage of to see what comes next, basically.

Very cool. So, Emma, thank you very much for joining me on the show. You’ve got a book as well, I believe, that you’ve recently published. Tell me about that.

I have, yeah. I’ve launched a new career as a professional speaker, and I work with businesses and organizations and conferences and things, delivering keynotes either about what inspires people about my journey or working with them on leadership lessons from the flight deck. And whenever I’ve given one of these presentations, you can’t say everything in 40 minutes. So, lots of people started to say to me, you really should put your story down on paper. And I thought, well, actually, I’ve got nothing to lose by doing that, because even if it’s just for me, it’s still interesting. And so, I did. I started writing the story down of how a pretty average girl from East Anglia decided she wanted to be a pilot and then became one. And it’s really the story of my journey into, though, and out of aviation and what I did next. And I wrote it to encourage people to understand that we have all got more in us. We’re all capable of much, much more than we ever think we’re capable of achieving. And it was really just to say to people, this is what happened to me. These are the challenges that I faced along the way that I flipped on their head and turned into opportunities.

And you can do it, too. So, it’s available on Amazon if you’d like to read it. It’s also available in Barnes & Noble, if you’re listening in the US. They actually have it in store, I believe. I’ve been told by my nephew that he’s seen it in a bookstore in Townsville in Australia.

Oh, wow.

So, if you’re listening to this in Townsville, Australia, and you know where that bookshop is. I need to know because I need to thank them. And so far, it’s been launched. I launched it a month ago. It was published a month ago. And I’ve sold 600 copies already, which is amazing. And people seem to be enjoying reading it, which is incredibly flattering when you poke your head above the parapet and expose yourself effectively on paper. You can’t take it back once it’s in print. So, for people to read it and enjoy it is incredibly… It’s a huge privilege for me to know that what I’ve written has been interesting for people.

Thank you so much for joining me on the show, Emma.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me and for having the podcast in the first place.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.  

ABOUT THE GUEST

Until September 2020, Emma Henderson was one of fewer than 500 female airline captains in the world, flying thousands of passengers all over Europe. Then, as COVID swept the globe and grounded Emma and her colleagues, she founded a charity, of which she became CEO, and chose to allow the sun to set on a flying career that spanned over three decades. Already well-known in the airline industry, Emma starred in an ITV documentary – Inside the Cockpit – in 2019 and overnight became known as “Captain Emma.”

Emma’s route into aviation is an unusual enough story on its own, but the challenges she has faced throughout her career have taught her more than most about leadership, resilience, perseverance, and grace, and she has used these skills to great effect at Project Wingman which has gained national acclaim uniting the airline industry in providing well-being support to NHS frontline staff across the UK and briefly, the US.

Emma’s story is one of determination, finding the good in everyone, inspiring and empowering her team of 6500 volunteers, leading from the front, and always with a generous heart.

Throughout her flying career she received many personal letters and messages from passengers thanking her for the way she chose to treat them and her crew, and she was nominated easyJet Captain of the Year in 2018.

Her charity has also been widely acclaimed, supporting thousands of people in the NHS and the airlines, and has been acknowledged not only by the NHS but also by the airline industry and government. Emma was made MBE for her services to charity in January 2021.

Emma shows us how to triumph over adversity, which she has successfully turned into a living demonstration of how to literally “Lead from the Front,” and she now uses the years of knowledge and experience she gained from a life at 37000 feet to inspire the next generation of aviators, mentoring aspiring pilots, giving her time as a STEM Ambassador and an Aviation Ambassador for the UK Department for Transport, painting pictures and telling stories of a life above the clouds that few have the privilege ever to witness.

To all who know her, Emma’s passion for her job has always shone through, and so her decision to take redundancy in September 2020 is an emotional story of having to make tough but right decisions and choosing to be grateful for what she has had and has been able to achieve.

Emma’s “career pivot” from airline captain to charity CEO has been inspirational, and the fact that so many people are still giving their time to volunteer for the charity she created is a testament to her leadership skills and generous personality.

In addition to her experiences of working and leading in a traditionally male-dominated environment, Emma is well versed in the transferable skills practiced daily by all pilots – teamwork, inspirational leadership, decision making, workload management, and communication have been as much Emma’s bread and butter over the last decade as her ability to fly and Emma is qualified to speak with considerable knowledge on a wide range of topics as a result.

Key achievements are reflected in all she has done, and Emma has been widely celebrated across the industry for these, being recognised as businesswoman of the year in 2023, she has also received a Points of Light award, an ACA Chairman Industry Recognition Award, was awarded the Brabazon Cup in 2021, as well as being made MBE. Most recently she has been recognised at the Speaker Awards as a Highly Commended Storyteller.

Emma has been delivering inspirational talks and presentations to a number of organisations for many years, working with RBS, NatWest, CAE, the MOD, the NHS, the London Insurance market, and EDF, to name but a few, and her fascinating story, ability to inspire and empower, her compassion and wry humour have delighted audiences in every arena and left them feeling equipped and compelled to become better versions of themselves.

For more information: https://www.emma-henderson.com/

Emma's Book Cover

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After the Crash: Miracle Survivor’s Mission for Change with Mercedes Ramirez Johnson

After the Crash: Miracle Survivor's Mission for Change

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE: 

ABOUT THE EPISODE

We invite you to join us for this compelling episode as we explore the incredible journey of Mercedes Ramirez Johnson, a miracle survivor of the 1995 airplane crash that tragically took 160 lives, including those of her parents. Tune in as Mercedes recounts her miraculous story, the critical safety issues uncovered in the aftermath, and the lessons learned from this tragedy. Listen in as she transforms her personal tribulation into a mission for change, striving to prevent future aviation disasters and ensuring no one else endures what she has been through.

READ THE EPISODE

Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me, Mercedes Ramirez Johnson. She’s a safety and Leadership Consultant but has an incredibly powerful story to share about her experience as a passenger on American 965. First and foremost, welcome to the show. Really excited to have you joining me today and blessed that you were able to walk away from that flight. Why don’t we start with a little bit of your personal story and that flight, American 965, what happened back in the 1990s?

First off, Eric, thank you so much for having me as a guest on your podcast. It’s a big honor to be here. And one thing that I can definitely say is the experiences that I’ve been through, hopefully, can help other people through their life and professional struggles that they endure. So, yeah, my story begins on December 20th, 1995. It happened to me be my 21st birthday. So, my parents and I were on our way to Cali, Colombia, to spend Christmas and New Year’s and celebrate my birthday. It was going to be the trip of a lifetime that they had been planning for years. And We lived in Kansas City, Missouri at the time, and so flying to Colombia was going to be pretty much a full day affair, but we were excited to be able to spend the holidays with our aunts and uncles and cousins and everybody. This was going to be the first time since my parents had left their homeland that they were going to be back for the Christmas holidays. It was really special for all of us, including all the passengers of American Flight 965. Most of the people on that flight were families who were just returning to go home for the holidays.

So, it was a very festive, happy atmosphere on that day.

I saw the review of the whole story of what happened. Definitely, it was a holiday moment. I heard the stories of people waiting to look at the beautiful lights for the holidays on approach. Tell me what happened, because this is a stunning series of events, a new airplane at the time, one of the most modern aircraft that existed, the 757. Nothing wrong with the flight itself, nothing wrong with the airplane itself, and yet on approach, everything went wrong.

Yes. As passengers, the vast majority of the flight was perfectly normal. My father at the time worked for another airline so we used to be able to fly for free on other airlines. So, my family and I were very comfortable with flying. If there was ever a little bit of turbulence, it was never something of concern to us because we used to fly so much. And as a passenger, I remember I took a nap on my father’s shoulder, and when I woke up, I woke up feeling a little bit of turbulence, but nothing out of control. It felt like we were flying through clouds. So, I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t scared. And I thought, oh, that interrupted a perfectly good nap. Let me fall back asleep again. And as I was trying to close my eyes and fall back asleep again, that normal little bouncing through the cloud’s feeling turned into just an abrupt situation where we, as passengers, just felt that the pilot took the nose of that plane and just pulled it straight up into the air, where one moment we’re flying regularly, horizontally across the sky, and the next moment, panic just erupts because we just feel that we’re just barreling into the sky like we were on a rocket ship or something.

As you can imagine, as passengers, we’re not hearing any announcements as to why we’re flying straight up into the sky. We don’t know why this is happening. Of course. But we just… Just pandemonic. People, men, women, children, everyone screaming and crying and panicking because we’re not aviation experts, but as a passenger, you know when something feels wrong, and we knew something was terribly wrong at that moment. It was probably a matter of 10 to 15 seconds where we’re flying straight up into the air. I remember hearing all these screeching, grinding sounds on both sides of the wings as we were heading up into the air. I And my instinct was just to grab my father’s hand and close my eyes. When I was little, I was used to close my eyes when I was scared. So even though it was my 21st birthday, I went into a little girl mode because I thought, oh, my gosh, this is just terrifying. And so, I grabbed my dad’s hand, closed my eyes, and I was just focusing on my mom’s voice in the row in front of me because she was praying out loud. And so, I was trying to ignore all the screaming and the crying of everybody else around me.

And I was just trying to focus on her voice and focus on calming myself down by just listening to her. And my last memory was just hearing this loud, crashing, booming sound that came from behind me. And at that time, I didn’t realize what that sound was. I just remember how scary it sounded because not only did I hear it, I felt it. And I didn’t realize at that moment that that loud, booming sound was actually our plane hitting the side of a mountain, making contact with a mountain. We weren’t supposed to land on a mountain.

No, you’re not. Nowhere near a mountain.

It was fatal contact at that moment. After that, I just blacked out, and I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the wreckage the next morning. It was something that during those last 10 to 15 seconds, we all knew something was wrong, but never did I think, oh, my gosh, we’re going to crash. Oh, my gosh, we’re going to die. I kept on thinking, okay, just fix it. Just straight. I remember under my breath, I kept on saying, just straighten it out. Just straighten it out. Just thinking, okay, if the pilot’s accidentally hit a button, just straighten this thing out. It can’t be that hard. I’ve been on a million flights. Just straighten it out. I guess that’s the eternal optimist in me, but I never actually thought, oh, my gosh, we’re to die. I just kept on thinking, just fix this. Just straighten it out.

You were literally feats away from probably having been able to straighten out if everything else had been done right. Although from what I gather, it wasn’t confirmed, but you weren’t necessarily that far away from that point. What if you share maybe some of the themes from the investigation? Because this one is a mind boggling one. When I was reviewing the incident, the series of mistakes, one after the other, things that should never happen on an airplane happened.

Right. I remember when I was still in the ICU, our family’s attorney I was in the ICU for nearly three months, recovering from all the injuries that I sustained from this crash. I was dealing with the grief of losing my parents because both my mom and my dad both instantly died upon impact of the plane hitting that mountain.

So sorry to hear that.

So aside from dealing with the grief of all that, I remember my parents’ attorney said, well, our main goal is for you to get better, but we’re going to be in talks with other passengers because there may be a lawsuit. And I thought, A lawsuit? It was an It’s nobody’s fault. It was an accident. As I was sitting there with five million different IVs in my neck and in my arms, and I wasn’t even thinking this lawsuit. Who thinks about these things when you’re in the middle of grief. But as the investigation unfolded, and of course, those things take years for the FAA and the NTSB to make their definitive conclusion decisions as to what caused the plane. But very early on, it was pretty evident that it was pilot error. It was human error. First, there was theories that the cartels had shot us down and that it was an on-purpose thing. All kinds of theories were running around in the hearts and the minds of different people. But once it became clear that it was indeed pilot error, it was very angering as someone who I’m just fortunate enough to have been able to survive it.

But for someone who lost their loved ones, my parents, I thought, oh, my gosh, this so easily could have been avoided. And not only that, but just even the pilots themselves lost their lives so needlessly, so uselessly. That’s where that bitterness really kicked in, because it was just a series of mistakes and oversights and omissions of things that should have been done, and verifications that should have been made, and navigational procedural steps that should have been taken that just did not happen. It didn’t happen because it wasn’t an issue because these were two brand new pilots. It didn’t happen because- No, 13,000 hours for the captain of flying. Especially, they are US-based. Different countries have different If you have pilots that are trained in other countries, the number of hours that they have to pass to become a pilot, you’re probably in the safest hands by flying with an American-based pilot. I don’t mean American Airlines, just a pilot in the US, the hundreds, if not thousands of hours that they have to prove in order to get their license. We were in the best hands. To my dying day, I will say that we were in the best hands.

These were two good men that just happened to have a really bad, bad day at work that day. It wasn’t because they intentionally crashed it, but it was really because of their lack of intention, their lack of mindfulness that just allowed this series of needless mistakes to happen.

There are some classic pieces that came out. We’ll go through some of the elements from the investigation. But there’s some classic elements where flight was delayed, there’s compounding issues where production pressure, this desire to arrive on time is an issue that happens in every industry. I would say aviation is one of the ones where they’ve done the best to manage it. But there’s still this desire to say, I need to land. There’s lots of references in the flight recording about the turnaround time, the rest time, and it’s right before the holidays. You’ve got multiple things that are creating an internal pressure. Tell me about some of the other elements that came out of the investigation because it’s, like you said, qualified, qualified people, lots of training, lots of oversight. Lots of phenomenal practices are in place, and yet simple mistakes that should have never happened occurred.

Right. I think I would say that the biggest mistake that caused this cascade of other mistakes was the fact that the pilots just entered in the wrong alphanumeric code into the navigational system. Not only did they enter in the wrong code, but then they didn’t cross verify to make sure, hey, did we enter in the wrong code? And so, everything they did from that point forward, they were making assumptions that they were headed in the right direction. But unfortunately, neither the captain nor the co-captain ever actually looked down to the navigational system to actually verify what coordinates had been entered. And neither the captain nor the co-captain ever looked down at the flight screen that would show them that we practically did a U-turn in the air, in mountainous terrain at night as our elevation is… We’re getting closer- Below the mountain range. Yeah, we’re getting closer to the ground because we were only about, I would say, 15, 20 minutes from landing. So, the landing gear sequence had already begun because as you get closer to the airport, you start slowing down and you start lowering your elevation. And so, they were basically flying at night with blindfolds on. 

And air traffic control kept on asking them to verify when they make it to certain waypoints. And instead of actually looking at the navigational system to actually answer those questions, they just kept on powering through. I don’t want to go as far as to say that they were ignoring air traffic controls questions, but they definitely weren’t answering them in a truthful like, okay, this is exactly where we missed that waypoint, but this is where we are now because they had no idea where they were. It’s evident in the recording. Only once in my life have, I actually put on my headphones and listened to the Blackbox recording. But just with talking with you a little bit earlier, I think I might listen to it again because I haven’t listened to it since 1996, so many moons ago. But when the only reason they knew something was wrong was because that ground proximity warning alarm started to go off in the cockpit. It came up. Yeah, and that alarm tells a pilot that you’re coming in hot. You’re basically coming in too close to the ground at too fast of a speed and you need to pull up.

As you’re listening to this black box recording, you can hear the automated robotic voice telling the pilots to pull up. As this alarm is going off, they are telling each back and forth, Why the bleep is this thing going off? Where the bleep are we? What the bleep is going on? Because that’s when they finally looked at their instrumentation and realized, Holy crap, we’ve gone off- Nowhere nearby. Yeah, we’ve gone off like 130 miles in the wrong direction. And that’s what somehow, we missed the first mountain range because our elevation was still slightly higher, but we ran out of luck once we hit the other, literally hit the other mountain range. And it wasn’t until that alarm went off that they had any idea that anything was wrong.

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When you look at that or we listened to the flight recording, because I had a chance to review it just before we spoke, complete situational awareness was completely lost. There’s a where they turned. The one you should be aware because as you said, you at night, you’re in between two valleys, in between three mountain ranges, essentially. They somehow ended up, instead of being in the mountain range, they should be in the valley, they should be, and they were in the one right next to it. Because they had turned 180 degrees, almost, sorry, 90 degrees to the left, almost, with the wrong instructions, which you would have felt the plane turn, rather than say, okay, are we in the right place? They continue and I essentially assumed that they had a direct landing. Now, the contributing factor is that I was listening to the radar for the ground was disabled, so it wasn’t working, so the airport had no visibility to where they were. There seems to be some signs where air traffic control was confused as to what they were hearing, but everybody had lost situational awareness based on at least the recording and some of the readings I had.

Right. Unfortunately, the cartels in retaliation to the government had destroyed a lot of those different radar towers leading to the airport. And so, communication between air traffic control and the pilots on approach to Cali, Colombia was always very, very pivotal, very important, because basically air traffic control is blind, and the pilots are relatively blind. They must rely on their instrumentation. But unfortunately for this flight, they chose not to. And so when it all boils down to it, after, I think it was about a five or six year investigation that the FAA conducted with the NTSB, both organizations ruled that for whatever reason, these pilots disregarded or just forgot or just did not complete 64% of the standard operating procedures from the time they pulled out of the gate in Miami until the moment we hit the side of that mountain. That doesn’t even include all the things that should have happened upon descent and approach and landing and taxiing and pulling to the gate. That doesn’t even include all the stuff that didn’t happen because we just didn’t make it to that point. Just from leaving Miami to the time we hit that mountain, for whatever reason, they only ended up doing 36% of all the standard checklists and verifications that they were supposed to have done.

If you think on any given day when anyone’s job is safety-focused, can you imagine going out in the field or going out on the line and only doing 36% of what you’re supposed to do? I mean, it seems insane. But these pilots weren’t insane. They just weren’t paying attention. Unfortunately for us, out here in the real world, we’re all guilty of losing situational awareness. We’re all guilty of mind wandering, where you could be in the middle of a task, but you’re thinking about the game that you watched last night, or you’re thinking about the last thing that your kids said as they were storming out the house on their way to school that morning. Our minds wander so much- Absolutely. That it’s up to us to get ourselves back to maintain that situational awareness, especially when our own health and safety and the health and safety of people around us is on the line. I think sometimes we can get so well experienced and so good at our jobs that we sometimes forget how tremendous of an impact our actions, or our inactions have.

I think this is the part is This is in an industry where there is very clear understanding that it’s very unforgiving environment to be operating in. This is the industry that has done the most from a safety standpoint, because if you look at there’s still somebody in America that dies, I think it’s every 96 minutes in a workplace injury. But if you look at aviation, it’s come a long way since the ’60s in a fairly nascent industry with only, I think, three fatalities on US oil in the last 15 years. So significant improvement. But you’ve got rigor, you’ve got consistency, you’ve got standard operating procedures, you’ve got checklist, it’s trained, it’s retrained and validated, and yet you can have drift. Exactly.  

Yes. And the pilots are evaluated for their health and their vision and mandatory age requirements. I mean, there’s so many things that are worked in to try to keep this as safe as possible, that it’s almost like you almost have to go out of your way to not be safe in that environment. And we’ll never, sadly, we’ll never be able to get into the minds of these pilots as to why they inadvertently allowed this to happen. But as ugly as it sounds, they did allow this situation to escalate beyond control.

I think the flip is also, to your As I said before, we all do these things. We all do careless things. This is the environment where there is a lot of constraints, checks, balances to make sure this doesn’t happen. But then when you say 64% was disregarded, in my mind, I’m thinking, this could happen anywhere else. In some cases, even if I think about utility workers, mind workers, the standard operating procedures, most of them are not detailed like they are in It can. And it’s very easy to get distracted.

Sometimes those workers are working as lone wolves. In this situation, there was two pilots in there. So it makes you wonder, Okay, I can understand maybe one of the pilots is completely disorganized that day and just doesn’t have his or her mind on the job. But what about the other person? What was it about the culture there or about the open lines or lack of open lines of communication? Did that other pilot even pick up on any of these things that were being disregarded, or were they also completely oblivious to what was going on? I mean, there’s just so many questions.

Yeah, because listening to the fight recording was mind-naming because the number… I just listened to the back to the tail end of it. But the number of things that you would expect, having been in a flight deck many times, have We listened to many other recordings, the number of things that were not happening that you would expect to happen and the amount of questioning attitude that’s drilled in in the aviation space, which is unfortunately not drilled in in so many other industries of saying, Hey, what just happened? What could go wrong here? We just drifted to the left. What could go wrong, assuming our plan is still good?

Right. It was almost like they were colorblind to the red flags that they themselves were creating, and they were just barreling through, whether it be to make up for lost time or whether it be because they were tired. We will never know. But regardless, the outcome is still the same. They unfortunately lost their lives, and then 160 other people lost their lives as well. Their families must live without loss, and everybody else’s family has to live without loss. No one in their right mind would ever accuse these pilots of being willfully negligent or willfully… Neither of them had a death wish that day. They were just two good people who just had a horrible, horrible day that day at work. And we’ll never know why but that’s why I’m so passionate about what I do is because if pilots can do this, where they’re constantly being asked to verify what they’re doing while they’re doing it, if a pilot can do that, what about someone who is working in a mine? What about someone who is an electrical worker or a plumber or someone at a plant? If this can happen to a pilot, it can happen to anybody in any industry.

I would say even probably more likely to happen.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. Because there’s less checks and balances than what you see normally in aviation and training and so forth. That’s why this This one is really an interesting one to just explore. I like what you’re trying to do, which is share. It’s not about those pilots. It’s about the learning for others and to see that if it can happen in this industry, it could happen anywhere else. Situational awareness can impact any of us. I think we can all admit that we’ve been at some point where we weren’t fully situationally aware. Where we make an assumption, and we assume the rest works. I’ve worked with some utilities where a team has a really good plan, something doesn’t go to the plan, and then the others are saying, Let’s go. But luckily, one of them says, hold on, we had a plan, it didn’t work. Let’s not keep going because we may have missed something else, which is what I would have expected here, say, well, we made one mistake that was apparent, or two, or three, or four. Any one of them should have said, what else is wrong with our assumption?

Where was voice of reason on that day. That’s just two people who literally have someone in their ear. They literally are listening to air traffic control, and they are constantly being asked these questions. If they can do it, if it could happen to them, it could happen to anyone.

The other part that strikes me is the comfort to speak up. There were really only three people in conversations at that point in time that knew anything that was going on, the two pilots and the air traffic control. And any one of them, and I think this can happen in any industry, I see this day in and out, far worse than other industries, because at least in aviation, there’s things like CRM that are trying to get people to feel comfortable speaking up. But how often do we see something, and we don’t say something? Any one of the three probably could have said something and say, hey, something feels off.

And I think that’s what’s so important about companies Company culture and safety culture is that it does not matter where you are on the org chart, whether you have a title of a manager or supervisor or not. If something feels off, if your gut feeling is kicking in, that is the Lord’s way of trying to protect you. And normally, our gut is usually right. And for us to dismiss those gut feelings, we are doing ourselves and our coworkers and the communities we serve and the clients we serve a major disservice. And we just start disregarding our own gut feelings. And if we’re jaded to the point where those gut feelings aren’t even kicking in, then I can’t help you there. But normally, if people are taking, quote, unquote, harmless shortcuts or doing things their own little way, like, well, yeah, that’s how you’re training We need to do that, but let me tell you how we actually do it. I ask my clients this question all the time, who do you think is more of a liability? The worker who’s been at it for 15, 20 years, who has a ton of experience and who is willfully doing things their own way?

Or is it the worker who is brand new, fresh out of training, who may make mistakes just based on lack of experience or lack of knowledge. In my assessment, I would think it’s the worker who’s been there for a long time, who is just willfully just going on their own little way instead of sticking to standard operating procedures and sticking to doing the work the way it should be done. Because all those rules, all those procedures, those are written in blood. They’re there for a reason. They’re not there to make your job harder or to frustrate you or to annoy you. They’re there to protect you. If people can remember that and keep that in the back of their mind as the foundation of how they make their decisions moving forward, people just need to remember that. For some reason, it’s just so easy to forget, which is why business is always good for me because I’m constantly going into different companies to just remind people of these procedures are there for a reason, and it’s to protect you. 

I would say it’s not even willful disregard. Too often, it’s even just drift where We get comfortable. We’ve cut a corner, or something worked. There was no consequence. Like you said, in aviation, the rules were built, were done in blood. There were some crashes. The industry learns more than any other industries, I would argue, in terms of anything that could go wrong, your misses, et cetera. There’s a lot of rules for a reason, but many of those rules won’t have an impact 99% of the time, 99.9% of the impact. You don’t need them. Every industry is the same. But that one time where you do need it, there’s a reason it was designed there. 

I think sometimes we get a false sense of security. So many of our processes are done in that Swiss cheese model where if something goes wrong, maybe we have something else built behind it to help mitigate that. But sometimes that can give us a false sense of security and comfort. That’s where the danger really lies, is having that… Competence is a great thing in your personal life but Having confidence in your ability. Confidence can sometimes turn into inadvertent arrogance, and we can’t allow that anywhere. When it comes to work, we can’t allow arrogance to take the place of confidence. We need workers who are confident in what they do in their ability, but we also need workers who have the humility to follow the rules, to have the humility to speak up or take direction when needed, and to do what’s best for everybody, not just personally. Well, I want to get off work here soon, or lunchtime’s coming up, so let’s go ahead and power through this. No, that’s not what’s best for… That may be what’s best for you because you have an amazing sandwich waiting for you in the break room.

But what’s best for the team is for us to do this and to do it the right way. Just having that open line of communication without fear of retaliation is very, very important.

I think that’s an important point because a lot of these themes, like overconfidence, these are biases that all humans have. As we’re successful, we keep saying, okay, we’re good at this. We can do it. And analogy often uses people speeding on the interstate. You know there’s a rule, there’s a reason for that rule. But when I ask any room who has never sped, there’s usually nobody who raises their hand because we accept that five miles an hour faster is okay, maybe 10, whatever the difference, and we start getting comfortable with it because we’ve handled things well most of the time. And most of the time, there is no impact, but maybe one time there will be.

We sometimes get numb to the risks we submit ourselves to. It’s not just a sign of the times. I think it just comes with being at a job or in an industry for so long that you just grow numb to the huge impact everything that you do has on everybody around.

Mercedes, thank you so much for sharing your story, the incident, but also bringing it to the reality that this can happen to anyone. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

The best way, they can just find me on my website, mercedesromeriusjohnson.com. I’m on all the social media platforms as well, but usually the best way is just to contact me through my website, and I would just love to talk to them about safety.

Excellent. Well, thank you very much for joining the show. It’s a miracle you survived because I think there’s literally, was it five people that walked away from that plane?

Out of 164 that were on board, including the crew and the pilots, only four of us survived.

Only four.

I am very, very blessed to be able to talk to you today and to be here alive still today.

Yes. And being able to share the learnings when I want. So, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, Eric. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.  

ABOUT THE GUEST

In 1995, Mercedes Ramirez Johnson narrowly survived a commercial airplane crash that killed 160 people, including her parents. She presents her proprietary Second Chance Living concept, an innovative mindset and approach with a proven track record, to organizations such as General Electric, ExxonMobil, Microsoft, NASA, Chevron, and the various branches of the US Armed Forces.

Before becoming a speaker, Mercedes spent nearly a decade in high-level sales in the pharmaceutical and medical software industries. A record-breaking, multimillion-dollar producer, she became the youngest female and sole Latino account executive at Cerner Corporation. She is an active leader in philanthropic organizations, advocating for special needs children and children’s health initiatives, notably for Make-A-Wish and The National MPS Society.

Mercedes and her story have been the subject of considerable national and international media coverage.

Her extensive media experience includes appearances on The BBC, National Geographic Channel, Discovery Health Channel, and as a recurring guest on numerous nationally syndicated daytime talk shows on NBC and ABC. In addition, numerous national magazines and major-market newspapers have run cover stories and special-interest pieces about her, and she was recognized as one of the country’s top young Hispanic up-and-comers by People Magazine’s Spanish Edition, People en Español.

Mercedes and her children reside in Dallas, Texas. To learn more, visit her website https://www.mercedesramirezjohnson.com/.

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