Lean Connections

Air Passenger Safety Checklist (and Crash Guide)

My Lean colleague Mark Graban noted on his blog this morning:

Kudos to Captain Sully and his crew… of course they used a “checklist” to help deal with their emergency… more hospitals need to adopt THEIR form of checklists to save lives in another way… I forgot my BlackBerry charger when I checked out of my hotel this morning… my wife says (of course) “You need a checklist or something, honey.” ZING!… So true.

Got me to thinking about the idea of a checklist for passengers.  I regularly use a packing checklist, two in fact, depending on whether my trip will be primarily for business or for pleasure. Just another way Lean Thinking carries over from professional to personal life. So how about a checklist for airline passengers?

Turns out my friend David Rowell, aka The Travel Insider, who sends me a newsletter every week, has already thought of this.  His four-part series provides passenger “checklists” for:

1. How to survive a plane crash
2. Picking the safest seats on the plane
3. Exiting the plane upon crash-landing, and
4. Bracing and other considerations.

Now, I fly a lot in my line of work.  Well, a bit less now that we’ve been working on our Green Search Initiative for a while.  But this sobering information could prove valuable to some of you other Road Warriors out there.  Read, evaluate and comment.  Be sure to drop David a note at his Web site to let him know what you think.

Hey, if doctors and nurses, plant managers, Lean Leaders and flight crews can benefit from checklists, then perhaps we as flyers, frequent or otherwise, should take a closer look as well.