Jet Blue flight doesn't land so safely at L.A.X. Sept. 21, 2005

The Jet Blue near disaster at LAX is a good example of quality gone bad somewhere. The consequences of decisions to fly a plane without proper maintenance and inspection present a sure-fire recipe for disaster. While the world watched, a Jet Blue plane with a cocked front landing gear safely landed at Los Angeles after leaving Burbank three hours earlier. The three hour twenty mile flight luckily resulted in a safe landing for all those aboard - thanks to the pilot’s expertise and no thanks to the decision making process that left the plane in improper flying condition. It is obvious that the wind at takeoff did not cause the landing gear to go awry. It is not uncommon for planes to be rushed through maintenance or preflight checks in order to make the schedule.

Situations like the Jet Blue accident are not as rare as we might like to believe. While Jet Blue and other airlines might like us to believe they are safe, the hidden agenda behind such incidents leaves us thankful that it was not one of those of us that watched it live on the Larry King show. Unfortunately for Jet Blue, LAX and the airline industry, quality does not always take a front seat to schedules, even when hundreds of lives are at stake. So, how does the landing gear get turned into that position anyway? Material failure? That’s certainly observable prior to takeoff. Was the checklist skipped or was there simply not enough time to finish it before gate time?

For those of us in the quality profession, tomorrow's damage control report by Jet Blue's management will just not tell the story. The FCC will take long enough so that most of us will forget the Jet Blue incident, but it could happen on any flight we take. Do we have to inspect the planes ourselves?

About the Author:

Dr. John Ryan is a consultant (http://www.ryansystems.com) and past lecturer for the Graduate School of Business at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California where he taught quality, operations, and project management as well as business statistics.

He has written numerous quality and operations improvement articles for Quality, Quality Progress, Factory of the Future and other magazines. Dr. Ryan published his first book with the American Society for Quality (The Quality Team Concept in Total Quality Control, ASQ, 1992). He has served for more than ten years in an expatriate role for companies such as Seagate Technology, Read-Rite, Sumitomo Heavy Metals, Destron and others throughout South East Asia and has developed across-the-web test software now used by web site owners for web site security and navigability improvement purposes.

The Quality Game may be found at http://www.TheQualityGame.com.