“We are responsible for the incident and its consequences.”
~ Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman on the fatal Philadelphia derailment. Whatever the engineer’s actions in speeding into the curve, it’s refreshingto see a CEO actually take responsibility for a crash. System Safety and Just Culture moving beyond the safety dept? (Guardian newspaper story 2 June 2015.)
“I ask that we pilots recommit to standardization. In 2015, one of the NTSB’s Most Wanted List priorities is to Strengthen Procedural Compliance. This means: follow your SOPs. If you think one of your procedures is inappropriate or unwise, ask your company to consider changing it, but until they do, follow it and potentially avoid a catastrophic incident.”
That’s how you fly a glider, a C172, or in his case, an A380. One with the wing.
Meet the man who taught Michael Jordan & Kobe Bryant meditation. If it has helped top athletes achieve high performance under demanding conditions, why would you not try it? It’s free!
Article in The Boston Globe, This mindfulness teacher gets results (just ask Kobe): Newton’s George Mumford teaches basketball greats — and everyday people — the power of flow.
“The crowd gets quiet, and the moment starts to become the moment for me . . . that’s part of that Zen Buddhism stuff. Once you get into the moment, you know when you are there. Things start to move slowly, you start to see the court very well. You start reading what the defense is trying to do.”
~ Michael Jordan, after making the game-winning shot to clinch the 1998 championship, his sixth.
“When you get in that zone, it’s just a supreme confidence that you know it’s going in. It’s not a matter of if – it’s going in. . . . Everything slows down. You just have supreme confidence. When that happens, you really do not try to focus on what’s going on [around you], because you could lose it in a second. . . . You have to really try to stay in the present, not let anything break that rhythm. . . . You get in the zone and just try to stay here. You don’t think about your surroundings, or what’s going on with the crowd or the team. You’re kind of locked in.”
~ Kobe Bryant, 5-time world champion, on his 81-point game in 2006.
Richard Champion de Crespigny was the Captain of Qantas Flight 32, an A380 that suffered massive systems damage when number two engine exploded and severed many connections. It is the kind of crazy emergency that we don’t train for. It’s the type of crazy emergency that shows airmanship isn’t all loops and rolls. It’s deep systems knowledge.
(Quote from an ‘Airways’ magazine interview, May 2015.)
