I’m a huge fan of planes, learning about accidents of planes (both Air Crash Investigation and National Geographic Investigation are my favorite). Among all the aircraft crisis, of the best is the landing of the US Airways 1549 into the Hudson River. In fact, the movie Sully is based on this incident. And this is an interesting dialogue from this move.
Davis: I’d like to add something on a personal note. I can say with absolute confidence that, after speaking with the rest of the flight crew, with bird experts, aviation engineers, after running through every scenario, after interviewing each player, there is still an X in this result. And it’s you, Captain Sullenberger. Remove you from the equation and the math just fails.
The above statement holds so good for a startup. In fact, I’m surprised by the number of airline related terms we use for business. Like, headwind, tailwind, runway, takeoff/launch and so on.
2020 is in no way a normal year. There were a ton of mini and major crises along the way. And on the positive side, we found a lot of people who stepped up to the challenge, well-fitting the X factor mentioned in the quote above.
Looking it from another perspective, it is these challenges and crisis that makes these folks shine. Any regular person would’ve quit or taken the wrong decision to crash the whole system. It takes these captains with the X factor to show their true skills and avert a crisis. Truly grateful to be working with these folks and learning from them.