This is a placeholder. The full article is published on Medium.
On October 30, 1935, a Boeing Model 299 prototype crashed on takeoff at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. The plane wasn’t faulty. The pilots weren’t inexperienced. The aircraft had simply become too complex to fly from memory.
Boeing’s solution was the checklist.
The original problem
The Model 299 — later known as the B-17 Flying Fortress — had so many systems that experienced test pilots were calling it “too much airplane for one man to fly.” The crash was attributed to pilot error: the gust lock had been left engaged. A checklist would have caught it in seconds.
What followed was one of the most successful safety interventions in the history of complex systems. Aviation didn’t just adopt checklists — it built a culture around them. Pre-flight, pre-takeoff, in-flight, emergency. Every phase of every flight, checked and confirmed.
CrowdStrike, 89 minutes later
In July 2024, a faulty content update from CrowdStrike caused roughly 8.5 million Windows devices to crash simultaneously. It was not a novel attack. It was a deployment with insufficient testing gates.
The question isn’t whether checklists would have caught this specific failure. The question is whether engineering has built a culture that treats them seriously — or whether we still believe that moving fast means skipping steps.
Read the full piece on Medium.