Speaker 1: So picture a really warm, late summer morning over the
Speaker 1: sprawling farms and cattle ranches of southern Texas.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, just one of those perfectly clear days exactly.
Speaker 1: The sky is just this endless, pristine blue, and up
Speaker 1: at about fifteen thousand feet you've got Continental Express flight
Speaker 1: twenty five seven four. It's beginning what you know, should
Speaker 1: be a completely routine descent into Houston, right.
Speaker 2: And it's an Embryer one twenty, which is a twin
Speaker 2: turboprop plane.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And inside the cockpit, the atmosphere is just incredibly relaxed.
Speaker 1: You have twenty nine year old Captain Brad Patridge and
Speaker 1: forty three year old First Officer Clint Rossovich. They're laughing,
Speaker 1: they're talking about their upcoming days off, making plans to
Speaker 1: play a little golf down on the coast.
Speaker 2: It's just, by all accounts, of perfectly normal day, just
Speaker 2: another morning commuter flight, really right, and crucially, I mean
Speaker 2: it was actually their second flight of the day in
Speaker 2: that very same aircraft. They had already flown from Houston
Speaker 2: down to Laredo entirely without a hitch. Now they were
Speaker 2: just making their return trip home.
Speaker 1: But then on the ground you have these two brothers,
Speaker 1: Carrie and Clifton, and they're just working on their tattle
Speaker 1: farm and the quiet of that morning is suddenly just
Speaker 1: shattered by a massive explosion up in the sky.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They look up and what they see is terrifying,
Speaker 1: and aircraft is spiraling downward, completely out of control. It
Speaker 1: plummets two thousand feet in mere seconds.
Speaker 2: That's incredibly fast it is.
Speaker 1: It slams into the earth at over five hundred kilometers
Speaker 1: per hour, which sends this secondary earth shaking explosion echoing
Speaker 1: across the Texas planes.
Speaker 2: The sheer speed and while the violence of it left
Speaker 2: observers on the ground in absolute shock.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to our topic. Welcome to today's deep dive.
Speaker 1: We have gathered a really fascinating stack of sources for
Speaker 1: this one, declassified NTSB accident reports, aviation engineering blueprints, historical
Speaker 1: flight data, original investigative notes.
Speaker 2: It's a lot of material and our mission today is
Speaker 2: to step directly into the shoes of the real life
Speaker 2: aviation accident investigators who are tasked with solving this mystery.
Speaker 1: Going to meticulously piece together how a perfectly functioning modern
Speaker 1: aircraft was doomed not by a violent storm and not
Speaker 1: by a bomb, but by a chain of seemingly microscopic,
Speaker 1: well intentioned human errors, errors that culminated in a catastrophic
Speaker 1: inflight breakup.
Speaker 2: Right, because the story really is a masterclass in how
Speaker 2: complex systems fail.
Speaker 1: It really is. It proves that for you, in literally
Speaker 1: any job, skipping what feels like a routine, tedious, administrative
Speaker 1: step can have unimaginable consequences.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and setting the scene on the ground near Eagle Lake, Texas,
Speaker 2: which is about one hundred and ten kilometers west of Houston,
Speaker 2: he was just absolute devastation. I can only imagine, Yeah,
Speaker 2: when the NTSB GO team arise at a crash site,
Speaker 2: I mean they're trained to process trauma, but this scene
Speaker 2: was particularly daunting. The smell of jet fuel and charred
Speaker 2: earth hung really.
Speaker 1: Heavy in the air, right, and the impact was so
Speaker 1: violent that the aircraft was completely pulverized into the soil.
Speaker 1: Like I was reading the one local observer set, if
Speaker 1: you didn't know what was an airplane, you would have
Speaker 1: just thought it was a pile of pop trash.
Speaker 2: It's just horrifying. All fourteen souls on board, so that's
Speaker 2: twelve passengers and the two pilots were gone. The investigators
Speaker 2: are walking into this chaotic, heartbreaking scene and they need
Speaker 2: answers immediately.
Speaker 1: Right away, a leading theory emerges, and honestly, if I'm
Speaker 1: listening to this and looking at the initial facts, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking it has to be a bomb. Oh, totally right,
Speaker 1: because you have eyewitnesses who are unanimous. They all swore
Speaker 1: they saw an explosion in mid air. One of them
Speaker 1: even said it looked like a hole the size of
Speaker 1: a Volkswagen was blown right into the side of the plane.
Speaker 2: And you know, the radar data seemed to support that
Speaker 2: initial hypothesis too. Oh really, Yeah, When air traffic controllers
Speaker 2: review the FAA radar tapes, they saw the plane drop
Speaker 2: off the screen instantly, which is unusual, very Usually, a
Speaker 2: struggling plane will leave a descending trail of radar hits.
Speaker 2: Disappearing instantly is the hallmark of an aircraft just disintegrating
Speaker 2: in the sky.
Speaker 1: And to make the bomb theory feel like a total
Speaker 1: slam dunk, the FBI receives this emergency tip. A federally
Speaker 1: detected witness in a major drug trial was supposedly booked
Speaker 1: on this exact flight.
Speaker 2: I mean, you can't write that, no.
Speaker 1: You have fire in the sky, instant radar disappearance, and
Speaker 1: this clear cinematic motive for foul play.
Speaker 2: So the FBI naturally swarmed the wreckage. They began meticulously
Speaker 2: swabbing the twisted metal, sending samples to their labs to
Speaker 2: test for chemical residue you know, nitrates, PTN, anything that
Speaker 2: would indicate high explosives. But the results, the lab results
Speaker 2: came back completely clean, zero chemical residue. There was absolutely
Speaker 2: no forensic evidence of a bomb.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the investigation has to pivot hard because if
Speaker 1: there was no bomb, how does a commercial plane just
Speaker 1: fall out of the sky in pieces? Right?
Speaker 2: And this is where structural experts like the NTSBS depack
Speaker 2: Joshi takeover. Joshi's first order of business at any crash
Speaker 2: site is to locate the four corners of.
Speaker 1: The airplane the nose, the tail, and the two wing tips.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and the embry are one twenty is what we
Speaker 2: call a ttail aircraft. So if you picture a commercial airplane,
Speaker 2: instead of the horror horizontal wings on the tail being
Speaker 2: down at the bottom near the fuselage, they sit all
Speaker 2: the way up on top of.
Speaker 1: The vertical fin so it looks like a giant capital.
Speaker 2: T precisely, but Joji can't find that horizontal stabilizer in
Speaker 2: the main crater. He eventually locates it a full two
Speaker 2: hundred meters away from the rest of the pulverized wreckage. Wow.
Speaker 1: Two hundred meters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and finding heavy components scattered that far away from
Speaker 2: the main impact zone, Well, it confirms the eyewitness reports.
Speaker 2: The plane did break apart while it was still high
Speaker 2: in the air.
Speaker 1: Okay, let me ask a question here. If it wasn't
Speaker 1: a bomb, how does a tail just snap off a
Speaker 1: plane in midair? My first thought goes to the age
Speaker 1: of the aircraft. Could it be metal fatigue?
Speaker 2: Like taking a paper clip and bending.
Speaker 1: It back and forth exactly until the metal finally just
Speaker 1: gives out.
Speaker 2: It's a good thought, and investigators can actually read broken
Speaker 2: metal like a book to answer that exact question. When
Speaker 2: a piece of aircraft illuminum fails from fatigue, it's a
Speaker 2: slow process, right. The metal bends back and forth over
Speaker 2: thousands of flights, and as the crack grows, the edges
Speaker 2: up against each other, smoothing the metal out. By the
Speaker 2: time it finally snaps, the brake is often smooth, clean
Speaker 2: and shows clear signs of dark oxidation or rust where
Speaker 2: air has been seeping in over time.
Speaker 1: So they put the embreyer's tail under a microscope. What
Speaker 1: did the fracture surfaces look like?
Speaker 2: They were jagged, bright, and violently torn. There were no
Speaker 2: smooth striations, no rust, and no signs of long term
Speaker 2: wear and tear.
Speaker 1: It's not metal fatigue, not at all.
Speaker 2: This is known as ductile overload. It told the investigators
Speaker 2: that the tail was ripped off suddenly by a massive,
Speaker 2: instantaneous aerodynamic force. It's a perfectly healthy piece of metal
Speaker 2: that was violently snapped by a force that was never
Speaker 2: designed to handle.
Speaker 1: Man. So, if the tail was ripped off by aerodynamic force,
Speaker 1: something else must have triggered the instability, right, because airplanes
Speaker 1: are designed to handle immense pressure, something had to disrupt
Speaker 1: the airflow exactly.
Speaker 2: To figure this out, investigators had to find the very
Speaker 2: first piece that fell off the plane, the ocean. His
Speaker 2: team examined the severed tail section resting in the field.
Speaker 2: They noticed a critical component was missing entirely. What was
Speaker 2: it the left leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer.
Speaker 1: Okay, so for those of you trying to picture this,
Speaker 1: the leading edge is a ten foot or roughly three
Speaker 1: meter piece of molded composite material. It sits on the
Speaker 1: very front lip of the tailwing.
Speaker 2: Right, and its job is to cleanly slice through the
Speaker 2: air and direct the airflow smoothly over the surface of
Speaker 2: the tail. It is absolutely critical for the plane's aerodynamic.
Speaker 1: And because it was missing from the tail assembly, it
Speaker 1: kicked off this exhausting massive search operation. Finding a grayish
Speaker 1: composite piece in the rough, grayish brown Texas scrubland is
Speaker 1: incredibly difficult.
Speaker 2: Well, it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
Speaker 1: Totally. They mapped out a twelve square kilometer grid. They
Speaker 1: had teams on four wheelers and helicopters flying overhead scouring
Speaker 1: the landscape and the oppressive Texas heat for three full days.
Speaker 2: They even brought in engineers from the aircraft manufacturer. They
Speaker 2: calculated the exact weight and aerodynamic drag of that specific
Speaker 2: ten foot piece.
Speaker 1: Right, and then they cross referenced it with the radar
Speaker 1: timestams and the wind vectors from that morning, just to
Speaker 1: calculate the mathematical trajectory of where it might have drifted there.
Speaker 2: Finally, on the third day, a searcher in a helicopter
Speaker 2: spots it.
Speaker 1: Where was it?
Speaker 2: It was resting against a cattle fence over a kilometer
Speaker 2: away from the tail section. It was perfectly camouflaged against
Speaker 2: the wire and the dirt. Ground teams had likely walked
Speaker 2: right past it multiple times.
Speaker 1: But when investigators finally get their hands on it, they
Speaker 1: make a chilling discovery. They look closely at the screw holes,
Speaker 1: the mounting points where this piece attaches to the rest
Speaker 1: of the tail.
Speaker 2: And what do they find.
Speaker 1: The screw holes on the bottom of the piece are
Speaker 1: heavily elongated. They're violently cracked and torn, which proves they
Speaker 1: had been forcefully ripped right through the metal fasteners during
Speaker 1: the breakup. Right But the screw holes on the top
Speaker 1: of the piece, they.
Speaker 2: Were pristine, absolutely perfect, no elongation, no tearing, no stress
Speaker 2: marks of any kind.
Speaker 1: Wait, if the top holes are perfect, that means there
Speaker 1: was no force rooping them out. The screws weren't torn out,
Speaker 1: they just simply weren't there to begin with.
Speaker 2: The forensic evidence was undeniable. There were absolutely no screws
Speaker 2: holding the top of that leading edge to the tail.
Speaker 2: It was essentially flapping in the wind, held onto the
Speaker 2: airplane only by the screws on the bottom.
Speaker 1: Okay, knowing those top screws were missing is an incredible breakthrough,
Speaker 1: but it creates a whole new mystery. We have a
Speaker 1: plane flying without its screws. To understand how that translates
Speaker 1: into a sudden, violent crash, we need to know what
Speaker 1: was happening in the cockpit.
Speaker 2: We need the black boxes exactly.
Speaker 1: So, the cockpit voice recorder, the CVR and the flight
Speaker 1: data recorder the FDR were recovered and rushed to the
Speaker 1: NTSB lab in Washington.
Speaker 2: And when you recover a CVR from an inflight breakup,
Speaker 2: you brace yourself. You expect to hear the chaotic sounds
Speaker 2: of an emergency blaring, master alarms, engine screaming, pilots frantically
Speaker 2: shouting and trying to muscle the flight.
Speaker 1: But the investigators put their headphones on and they hear
Speaker 1: none of that.
Speaker 2: Nothing.
Speaker 1: The audio is crystal clear and it is entirely routine.
Speaker 1: The pilots are calm. First Officer Roseovic even makes a
Speaker 1: joke as he begins their descent into Houston. He says,
Speaker 1: pushing this descent making like the Space Shuttle.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And then nothing new, warning, alarms, no shouts, just the abrupt,
Speaker 1: violent end of the recording.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because the speed of the breakup was beyond human
Speaker 2: reaction time. The sudden loss of the tail threw the
Speaker 2: plane into what we call a massive negative G force maneuver.
Speaker 1: What does that actually mean for the human body? Like,
Speaker 1: what do negative five g's do to a person in
Speaker 1: a fraction of a second.
Speaker 2: Well, when you ride a roller coaster and get pushed
Speaker 2: down into your seat, those are positive G forces. Blood
Speaker 2: drains from your head. Negative G forces do the exact opposite.
Speaker 2: You are violently thrown upward against your seatbelt, oh man,
Speaker 2: and negative five g's all the blood in your body
Speaker 2: rushes instantly into your brain. It causes a phenomenon called
Speaker 2: a red out, followed by immediate unconsciousness.
Speaker 1: So they didn't even know.
Speaker 2: No, the pilots and passengers were completely incapacitated before they
Speaker 2: even had time to register that something was wrong.
Speaker 1: Which I guess is a small mercy in a horrific situation.
Speaker 1: But I keep coming back to a glaring contradiction in
Speaker 1: the timeline here. This was the crew's second flight of
Speaker 1: the day in this exact plane. They had already flown
Speaker 1: over eight hundred kilometers from Houston down to Laredo that morning,
Speaker 1: presumably with those exact same screws missing, and they landed safely.
Speaker 1: Why did the plane decide to fall apart? Now on
Speaker 1: the way back, the flight.
Speaker 2: Data recorder solves that puzzle, and it all comes down
Speaker 2: to aero dynamic pressure. On their first flight of the
Speaker 2: day down to Laredo, the flight data shows the plane's
Speaker 2: maximum speed was two hundred and sixteen knots, which is
Speaker 2: about two hundred and fifty miles per hour. Okay, the
Speaker 2: aerodynamic forces pushing against that loose leading edge were strong,
Speaker 2: but the bottom screws held on.
Speaker 1: But on the fatal return trip they went faster.
Speaker 2: Remember First Officer Roseovich saying that or making like this
Speaker 2: space shuttle, He initiated a steep, rapid descent into Houston.
Speaker 2: The FDR data graph shows the plane speed surging to
Speaker 2: two hundred and sixty knots, that is almost three hundred
Speaker 2: miles per hour.
Speaker 1: Let's put this an everyday perspective for you guys. Imagine
Speaker 1: you're driving your car and your hood latch is broken,
Speaker 1: but you don't realize it. If you're just driving around
Speaker 1: your neighborhood at thirty miles an hour, the weight of
Speaker 1: the hood keeps it down. The wind isn't strong enough
Speaker 1: to lift it. But the second you merge onto the
Speaker 1: highway and hit eighty miles an hour, that increased wind
Speaker 1: resistance gets under the front lip of the hood, catches
Speaker 1: it like a parasuit, and violently rips it open.
Speaker 2: That mechanism is exactly what happened at fifteen thousand feet
Speaker 2: at three hundred miles per hour. The intense aerodynamic drag
Speaker 2: finally caught the unattached top lip of that leading edge.
Speaker 2: The wind literally got inside the structure of the tailwing
Speaker 2: and it just bent it back. It bent the composite
Speaker 2: material downward further and further until the sheer force of
Speaker 2: the oncoming air snapped the piece completely off.
Speaker 1: Okay, I understand how the piece fell off, But earlier
Speaker 1: you said the main wings ripped off the fuselage. Wait,
Speaker 1: the tail piece falls off, but the main wings rip off.
Speaker 1: How does that work?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So to understand the catastrophic chain reaction, you need
Speaker 2: to know how a horizontal stabilizer functions. It operates essentially
Speaker 2: like an upside down wing. While the main wings of
Speaker 2: an airplane create lift to pull the plane up, the
Speaker 2: horizontal statilizer creates downward aerodynamic pressure to push the tail down.
Speaker 2: This acts as a counterbalance against the heavy engines and fuselage,
Speaker 2: keeping the nose of the plane up and level.
Speaker 1: So when that leading edge stepped.
Speaker 2: Off, it instantly destroyed that downward pressure on the tail.
Speaker 2: Without that aerodynamic counterbalance pushing down, the tail violently popped
Speaker 2: up into the air. This forced the heavy nose of
Speaker 2: the plane down into that unrecoverable negative five g dies.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, And now to your question about the wings.
Speaker 2: Commercial airframes are incredibly strong, but they're designed to handle
Speaker 2: upward lift positive gs. They are meant to be supported
Speaker 2: by the air underneath them. Right when the nose violently
Speaker 2: pitched down, the entire aircraft was subjected to extreme downward
Speaker 2: structural stress. It was never engineered to handle. The main
Speaker 2: wing spars simply snapped upward as the fuselage was thrown
Speaker 2: violently down. The plane literally disassembled itself in the sky.
Speaker 1: So the physics explained the crash perfectly. A steep descent
Speaker 1: created extreme drag, which caught a loose piece of composite,
Speaker 1: which destroyed the counterbalance, which forced the plane into a
Speaker 1: dive that tore the airframe apart exactly but airplane parts
Speaker 1: don't just unscrew themselves. To find the true culprit, we
Speaker 1: have to figure out who touched that tail last.
Speaker 2: And this is where the investigation shifted from a mystery
Speaker 2: of physics to a tragedy of human error. Investigators trace
Speaker 2: the aircraft tailed number seven oh one back to a
Speaker 2: maintenance hangar at the Houston Intercontinental Airport the night before
Speaker 2: the crash.
Speaker 1: What were they doing to it?
Speaker 2: Well? In preparation for winter, the crew had a ten
Speaker 2: hour overnight window to replace the rubber the ice boots
Speaker 2: on both the left and right sides of the horizontal
Speaker 2: stabilizer right.
Speaker 1: These d ice boots are pneumatic rubber bladders on the
Speaker 1: leading edges that inflate to break off ice during winter flights.
Speaker 1: To replace them, mechanics have to completely remove the leading
Speaker 1: edge to access the pneumatic lines, strip the old boot,
Speaker 1: glue the new one on, and screw the whole heavy
Speaker 1: assembly back onto the tail.
Speaker 2: Doing both sides is a massive job for one night shift,
Speaker 2: it really is, and they were heavily pressed for time.
Speaker 2: The mechanics were struggling to remove stripped screws on the
Speaker 2: bottom of the right side. This is where we meet
Speaker 2: an inspector named Troy Anderson. Seeing that the mechanics were
Speaker 2: falling behind, Anderson decided to climb up on a three
Speaker 2: story man lift and help out by removing the top
Speaker 2: screws on the left side of the tail.
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, I'm putting myself in their shoes if
Speaker 1: they are behind schedule. Isn't teamwork a good thing? Like
Speaker 1: why wouldn't you want an extra pair of hands to
Speaker 1: help get a plane ready for the morning.
Speaker 2: In a normal office. Yes, in aviation maintenance, it is
Speaker 2: what we call the cardinal sin of structure. Really, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: the entire philosophy of aviation safety relies on rigid redundancy.
Speaker 2: You have one group, the mechanics, who are the doers
Speaker 2: they preferm the physical labor. Then you have an entirely separate,
Speaker 2: independent group, the inspectors, who are the checkers.
Speaker 1: Ah I say, their sole.
Speaker 2: Job is to verify that the work was done perfectly.
Speaker 2: By picking up a screwdriver and doing the physical labor himself,
Speaker 2: Anderson compromised his role. He could no longer be an
Speaker 2: independent set of eyes on that section of the plane.
Speaker 1: Because he stepped out of his designated role. This deadly
Speaker 1: chain of unseen errors began. So step one, Anderson removes
Speaker 1: the top screws on the left leading edge. He puts
Speaker 1: them in a little bag about forty screws and just
Speaker 1: leaves that bag sitting on top of the elevated man
Speaker 1: lift three stories up by the tail.
Speaker 2: Then step two involves the paperwork. In aviation, if it
Speaker 2: isn't documented, it didn't happen right. Mechanics are required to
Speaker 2: fill out shift work cards detailing exactly what parts were removed,
Speaker 2: so the next shift knows where to pick up. But
Speaker 2: Anderson wasn't a mechanic, he was an inspector, so he
Speaker 2: didn't do it. He figured he just took out a
Speaker 2: few screws to be helpful, and it wasn't worth the
Speaker 2: administrative hassle of filling out the labor cards, so he
Speaker 2: documented absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1: Then we hit step three, the shift change. It's ten
Speaker 1: years zero pm, the evening shift is clocking out and
Speaker 1: the midnight shift supervisor takes over. The mechanics realize they
Speaker 1: only have time to finish one side of the plane
Speaker 1: before the morning flight schedule.
Speaker 2: And this leads to the most critical tragic communication failure
Speaker 2: of the night. The midnight shift supervisor asks the departing
Speaker 2: evening shift, have you started on the left.
Speaker 1: Side yet, And because the evening mechanics had only worked
Speaker 1: on the bottom of the right side, and because Inspector
Speaker 1: Anderson hadn't filled out any paperwork documenting that he had
Speaker 1: removed the top screws on the left side, the evening
Speaker 1: supervisor looks at him and says, no, we haven't touched
Speaker 1: the left side.
Speaker 2: Operating on that false information, the midnight shift makes a
Speaker 2: fateful decision. They decide to forget the left side for
Speaker 2: the night, finish with lacing the boot on the right side,
Speaker 2: and get the plane out of the hangar.
Speaker 1: So they spend all night working on the right side.
Speaker 1: They reattach it perfectly, and then the plane is rolled
Speaker 1: out onto the tarmac for its morning flights. YEP sitting
Speaker 1: three stories up in the air, entirely out of sight
Speaker 1: from anyone standing on the ground. The left leading edge
Speaker 1: of the tail is resting in place, but it has
Speaker 1: absolutely no screws holding the top of it to the aircraft.
Speaker 2: It held together just long enough for the slower flight
Speaker 2: to Laredo, but the high speed descent back into Houston
Speaker 2: was the breaking point.
Speaker 1: It is genuinely hard to process this. It wasn't malice,
Speaker 1: wasn't sabotage. No mechanic woke up wanting to do a
Speaker 1: bad job.
Speaker 2: No not.
Speaker 1: It was a terrifying comedy of errors, a series of tiny,
Speaker 1: seemingly helpful shortcuts, and inspector deciding to lend a hand,
Speaker 1: a worker deciding to skip a tedious form for taking
Speaker 1: out a few screws, of verbal miscommunication during a shift change.
Speaker 1: Those tiny, invisible choices doomed fourteen people, and.
Speaker 2: This crash became a massive watershed moment in aviation history.
Speaker 2: When the NTSB released their final report, they did something unprecedented.
Speaker 2: For the first time ever. They didn't just point the
Speaker 2: finger at the mechanics on the hangar floor.
Speaker 1: They looked higher up.
Speaker 2: Yes, they placed a significant portion of the blame directly
Speaker 2: on Continental Expresses corporate management.
Speaker 1: The NTSB stated that leadership had fostered a maintenance culture
Speaker 1: where cutting corners, rushing turnarounds, and skipping tedious paperwork was
Speaker 1: normalized and accepted. Management had allowed a climate where the
Speaker 1: rules were viewed as flexible guidelines rather than rigid laws.
Speaker 2: This tragedy completely revolutionized airline maintenance. It forced the industry
Speaker 2: to adopt strict computerized tracking systems for every single bolt
Speaker 2: and screw removed from an aircraft.
Speaker 1: Which is so necessary it is.
Speaker 2: It also birthed the modern speak up culture we see
Speaker 2: in high stakes industries today, where frontline workers are rigorously
Speaker 2: trained and encouraged to question everything, to stop the line
Speaker 2: if something doesn't feel right, and to never step outside
Speaker 2: their designated roles.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for you listening right now?
Speaker 1: We started this deep dive talking about a clear Texas
Speaker 1: morning where a perfectly good machine suddenly fell out of
Speaker 1: the sky. We all have our own version of paperwork
Speaker 1: in our jobs. The tedious administrative steps, the sign offs,
Speaker 1: the ship change notes that we assume don't really matter
Speaker 1: in the grand scheme of things. But flight two five
Speaker 1: seventy four proves that in any complex system, the most mundane,
Speaker 1: invisible skip step can be the very thing that brings
Speaker 1: the whole structure crashing down. The paperwork isn't just bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it is the unseen load bearing wall holding everything together.
Speaker 2: There's a concept in engineering called the normalization of deviance.
Speaker 2: When we break a rule or skip a step and
Speaker 2: nothing bad happens, we start to think the rule is pointless,
Speaker 2: we do it again and again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it becomes a habit exactly.
Speaker 2: But you aren't proving the rule wrong. You are just
Speaker 2: slowly removing layers of safety until the holes finally line up.
Speaker 1: The Next time you're attempted to skip a routine step
Speaker 1: because you already did the work, or you'd just want
Speaker 1: to lend a hand, ask yourself who else is depending
Speaker 1: on that paper trail? What invisible load bearing wall are
Speaker 1: you removing? Keep questioning the systems around you. Thanks for
Speaker 1: joining us on this deep dive