During my sabbatical from writing this column this summer, I watched an interesting program on the National Geographic Channel’s “Mayday” series¹. It serves as a terrific example of how a good root cause analysis can get to the heart of a seemingly complicated problem.

The show focused on the details of British Airways flight 5390, which left the U.K.’s Birmingham International Airport for Malaga, Spain, on June 10, 1990. About 13 minutes into the flight, the left windscreen blew out, sucking the pilot halfway out of the aircraft. (The pilot had unbuckled his shoulder harness after takeoff.) The pilot’s feet caught on the flight controls and a flight attendant who happened to be in the cockpit grabbed the pilot’s waist, keeping him from being completely sucked out of the aircraft. The pilot was bent backward over the top of the aircraft in a 500-mph freezing-cold slipstream with little oxygen.

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