# How to Crash an Airplane (Nickolas Means, 2015)

> A RubyConf talk with almost no Ruby in it: the true story of a doomed flight, told to teach software teams how to work together.

**"How to Crash an Airplane"** is a talk **Nickolas Means** gave at **RubyConf 2015** that barely mentions code at all. Instead he tells the story of **United Airlines Flight 232** and uses it to draw out lessons about how great teams work under pressure.

On **July 19, 1989**, Flight 232, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 flying from Denver toward Chicago, suffered a catastrophic engine failure that severed all three of its hydraulic systems and left the crew with almost no way to steer the plane. It should have been unsurvivable. Working together, the pilots figured out how to nudge the crippled jet by varying the thrust of its two remaining engines, and crash-landed at Sioux City, Iowa. Of the 296 people on board, 184 survived. The event is now a textbook case of **crew resource management**, the aviation practice of pooling the whole crew's attention and speaking up freely rather than deferring to the captain's word alone.

Nickolas's point is that software teams have more in common with that cockpit than you would think, and that the way the best crews communicate, distribute the work, and stay calm is something engineers can learn from directly.

**Why is a talk with no Ruby in it a RubyConf highlight?** Because Ruby conferences have a distinctive tradition of the "narrative talk": a speaker uses a gripping true story, often from outside software entirely, to teach something about how we build and work together. The community tends to prize this genre alongside the deeply technical talks, and Nickolas Means became one of its most beloved practitioners, returning to tell more history-driven stories in later years. If you are new to Ruby conference culture, this talk is a perfect example of the form, and it holds up even if you never write a line of Ruby. Watch it in full on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2FUSr3WlPk).

*Related:* ["Wat" (Gary Bernhardt, 2012)](https://chunkybacon.dev/talks/wat.md) · [_why the lucky stiff](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/why-the-lucky-stiff.md)

## Sources
- How to Crash an Airplane (RubyConf 2015 talk page, RubyEvents): https://www.rubyevents.org/talks/how-to-crash-an-airplane
- RubyConf 2015 - How to Crash an Airplane by Nickolas Means (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2FUSr3WlPk
- United Airlines Flight 232 (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232

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Source: https://chunkybacon.dev/talks/how-to-crash-an-airplane/
License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)