Air France Airbus A330-200 aircraft, similar to the one used for Flight 447
Air France #447 was a scheduled commercial flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France, on 1 June 2009 that broke apart in flight and fell into the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of all 216 passengers and 12 crew members.[1]
And even though there has been little recovery of the debris, experts believe that tiny, wing-mounted airspeed indicators are the likely culprit of this horrific crash. Given the storm the plane flew into, the airspeed sensors falsely alarmed the crew that the plane was stalling (i.e., not enough air was moving over the wings).
Shrill alarms would have sounded, directing the crew to take corrective actions: Rapidly throttle-up. Put the nose down (to increase speed). Or both.
The only problem? Air France 447 wasn’t in a stall.
But given the weather conditions and that it was a night-flight, the crew was unable to know anything other than what their instruments told them. So when the pilot properly reacted to the “stall,” he actually gunned the plane beyond its physical limits. Fast enough to literally rip the wings off.
All because of faulty sensors giving the wrong information.
What’s this got to do with Marketing and Sales?
As business leaders, we rely upon our own set of sensors. We have hard data like financial reports and operational metrics and website analytics (thank you Google!). We get smooshy data like sales forecasts and customer satisfaction surveys, which introduce human bias. We also have less reliable inputs like the opinion of our loudest sales person who might be right or wrong on any given day.
The fact is, we have plenty of indicators, but few are reliable. And most don’t give us the early warning signals we need. Not only are we awash in an overwhelming amount of data, we lack one or two or three reliable metrics we can turn to in order to determine truth from fiction.
Air France #447 shows us what can happen when we rely upon one key indicator, especially one that compels us to abruptly change course without conferring with other analytics.
What indicators or analytics do you rely upon in your business?
