Flights Gone Wrong

Real stories. Deeper understanding.

Ruth Calloway

Crew decisions and human factors

Ruth Calloway writes about the people at the centre of an accident: the crew, the controllers and the decisions they made with what they knew at the time. Her guides follow the cockpit voice recorder transcripts and the human-factors findings of the final reports, and explain ideas such as crew resource management, workload and the Swiss cheese model in plain words. She reports error in the investigators' own terms, without blame, and closes each piece with what crews were taught differently afterwards.

Writes about

  • Crew decisions
  • Crew resource management
  • Air traffic control
  • Controlled flight into terrain
  • Fuel exhaustion
  • Runway incursions
  • Mid-air collisions

Ruth Calloway is a house byline of the Flights Gone Wrong editorial team. Drafts are prepared with software help, and every fact is checked against the sources cited on the page. How we check facts

By Ruth

5 guides

  • Runway Incursions: How Tenerife and Near Misses Shaped Rules

    Causes

    A runway incursion is any aircraft, vehicle or person wrongly on a runway, and the worst ones end with two aircraft on the same strip of concrete at the same time. Tenerife in 1977 remains the deadliest accident in aviation history, and later collisions at Detroit, Los Angeles and Milan led to the radio rules, surface radar and automatic warning lights in use today.

    7 min read

  • The Swiss Cheese Model: Why Air Accidents Need Many Failures

    Investigations

    The Swiss cheese model, developed by psychologist James Reason, explains why an air accident almost never has a single cause: several layers of defence each have to fail, and their weak points have to line up. Two real accidents, the Gimli Glider and Helios Airways Flight 522, show how it works.

    8 min read

  • What Changed After Tenerife: CRM and Clearer Radio Calls

    What changed

    The 1977 runway collision at Tenerife killed 583 people and turned on a few words of radio and a cockpit where no one stopped the captain. This guide explains the two big changes that followed, standard radio phrasing and crew resource management, and where they have since saved lives.

    7 min read

  • Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT): Why Good Planes Crash

    Causes

    Controlled flight into terrain, or CFIT, is the name investigators give to a crash in which nothing was wrong with the aircraft: a qualified crew flew it into the ground, water or an obstacle without realising they were in danger. Ground proximity warnings from 1974 and terrain awareness systems from 2002 to 2005 were the industry’s answer, and the FAA reports the CFIT accident rate has fallen since.

    6 min read

  • Why Planes Run Out of Fuel: How Fuel Exhaustion Happens

    Causes

    Airliners rarely run out of fuel, and when they do it is almost never one mistake: a wrong conversion factor, an undetected leak or a crew unable to act has to get past several checks. This guide explains how it happens, using the official findings on the Gimli Glider, Air Transat Flight 236 and Helios Airways Flight 522, and what changed afterwards.

    9 min read