Air France Crash

The Associated Press has posted an article about the Air France crash with the title, "Multiple factors eyed in case of missing jet." Experts tell the writer that lightning or turbulence alone are unlikely to have caused the crash. Here is a brief excerpt:

Although aviation experts stressed it was much too early to speculate about the causes of the disappearance, they noted that the incident was most likely caused by various factors that combined to cause a catastrophic chain of events. "It sounds like something that evolved into a problem, not something that happened instantly," said Bill Voss, president and CEO of Flight Safety Foundation, in Alexandria, Virginia. "It would appear that their systems were degrading but we don't know why they were degrading." Most aviation accidents are the result of the combination of several adverse circumstances which by themselves would not ordinarily be dangerous.

The lesson here applies to all large-scale failures, not simply aviation accidents. Most large-scale failures result from a series of small errors and failures, rather than a single root cause. These small problems often cascade to create a catastrophe. Accident investigators in many fields, not simply aviation, have shown that a chain of events and errors typically leads to a particular disaster. The key lesson: Be wary of trying to identify a single root cause; search instead for all the links in the chain of events that led to catastrophe.