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How to crash an airplane – Nickolas Means | The Lead Developer UK 2016

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  • Recommended by 5 people: 4 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2024.
  • Presented by Nickolas Means, VP of Engineering at Wellmatch Health

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

1.5M views9 years ago5 recommendations

Tools and practiceCareers and interviewsCode review and teamworkEngineering management

Nickolas Means analyzes the crash of United Airlines Flight 232 to draw powerful lessons on teamwork, leadership, and crew resource management for software teams.

On July 19, 1989, United Airlines Flight 232 was en route to Chicago when a mechanical failure caused the plane to become all but uncontrollable. In this unsurvivable situation, the flight crew saved more than half of those onboard. How did they do it? Flight crews and software teams actually have a lot in common, and there’s much we can learn from how the best crews do their jobs. What can we learn from the story of United 232? While this talk won’t earn you your pilot’s license, you’ll definitely come away with some fresh ideas on how to make your team even more amazing. ABOUT NICKOLAS MEANS Nick hails from Austin, TX, the Taco Capital of the World. When he’s not busy eating tacos, he’s the VP of Engineering at Wellmatch Health, working with an incredibly talented team of developers to bring transparency to healthcare pricing. He’s a huge believer that software development is mostly human interaction and that empathy is the key to building great software.

Why it's here

5 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as a gripping and insightful talk on how high-performing teams handle crises and collaborate under pressure.

bertilon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Why you've never been in a plane crash”

When the conference LeadDev happens in London, they often have Nickolas Means give a talk about an aeronautic topic. It’s usually 45 minutes of nail-biting in-depth analysis of a very complicated problem, and ends with a 5 minute rotation to how the lessons from that incident apply to engineering management in general. (You also feel like you could engineer an airplane, but no you can’t: that’s just Nickolas’ talent for explanation that is fooling you. Airplanes are very hard to make.) This is all done in such a smart, seamless, obvious way to deliver a lesson that would make the Brothers Grimm feel cheated. Strongly recommend. link link to this video link
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jameson Lobsters • Recommends

How to crash an airplane
6View on Lobsters

nrbon Hacker News • Recommends

On “In a Life-or-Death Crisis, Humility Is Everything”

The article does a poor job of explaining how truly incredibly the flight crew of United Airlines Flight 232 performed under crisis; I watched a talk1 by Nickolas Means recently that goes deeper into the events of that day and the lessons learned. Wikipedia also has a good summary of the NTSB accident report3. 1: link to this video 2: link 3: link
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wp381640on Hacker News • Recommends

On “List of YouTube channels for improving web development and programming skills”

…ta science, big companies / startups as a dev and some funny vids: link 7. Wes Bos - decent css explainer vids for whenever you're _how do i align the fucking boxes_ + react / js link 8. Rect conf - Sophie and Dan's presentations are great: link 9. Nickolas Means - not a channel but two presentations that are good: 9.1 How to crash a plane : link to this video 9.2 The original skunk works: link There are tons of shitty tutorial videos and channels to avoid if you just rely on search (the comments are full of what appear to be dev contractors out of their depth begging for solutions)…
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latchkeyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Waymo's collision avoidance testing”

I watched this video yesterday which seems really applicable... How to crash an airplane – Nickolas Means link to this video Reflecting on the video, they don't need to save everyone, but it certainly should be the first time when not everyone dies.
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hnarnon Hacker News • Mentions

On “FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics”

That depends on your definition of "tricky". If you mean something that requires human intelligence, I would say it's the complete opposite. More or less the first thing pilots start doing during an emergency is to follow lists, it's all very procedural and most failures have been predicted in advance, as well as what would need to be done to resolve them, or at least eliminate the immediate threat -- and if these procedures do not help, you are in a very bad place anyway. There are exceptions, of course.1 I would say that the "tricky parts", as always, are very generally the situations that we did not predict and did not program for. 1: link to this video
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lmilcinon Hacker News • Mentions

On “How to Land a ‘Completely Uncontrollable’ Passenger Jet (2018)”

If you are into that sort of thing here is United Airlines Flight 232 where they lost all control except for being able to throttle one remaining egine (and consequently steer but only to the right) link to this video
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