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Landing Gear & Defense of Perfectionism

D'Anne Harp
Jun 10, 2015
4 min read

Yesterday I took the DISC personality profile test, and it revealed that I am conscientious, detailed, analytical, quality-oriented, and very, very creative. Let's look at the first half of the results though. One of the words coworkers use about my style can in fact be "perfectionist".

To which I've often scoffed, saying, "If you only knew how much I've already compromised, you wouldn't be saying that!" As such, in the past, I've really taken exception to the "perfectionist" label, since it has negative connotations, and I've really felt I'm more of an idealist, because, let's be real, perfection does seem unattainable at times. However, I absolutely AIM and design for accuracy and quality in my work.

Last night, the person administering the test reassured me, saying, "If I take my car to the mechanic, I WANT him to be a perfectionist! I EXPECT him to ensure that he's addressed the right problems, and that all the parts are exactly where and how they need to be."

And this got me thinking--and appreciating myself more. I got to see that my "perfectionism" -- aiming for high performance -- should be more highly regarded.

If you were going in for open-heart surgery, you would want everyone in the OR to be perfectionists in regard to your treatment. Having someone leave a sponge, clip, or tool in your chest cavity is not an option, right? Messing up on your heart stents is not an option, right?

And this morning, a friend of mine posted recent footage of JetBlue flight 292 making an emergency landing with the front landing gear (nose wheel) locked at 90 degrees. Having a sharply angled nose wheel like this is like landing a jump with your knee turned out to the side. The joint is not made to accommodate force from that angle, and the knee will fail, and your body will collapse. In the case of the plane, the wheel would certainly fail on contact (when being forced to roll sideways), and the resistance would either cause the plane to pop upwards or grind down into the tarmac. Either way, not good for the plane or the people on board.

(Not super-fond of the narrative, but the footage shows the 90 degree nose wheel quite clearly) The perfectionist tendencies of the pilot allowed him to execute the emergency landing, per procedure:

Bleed off the fuel prior to landing to decrease the risk of fire.
Take the longest runway to allow for a friction landing.
Decrease approach speed while maintaining glide slope.
Moving passengers and carry on luggage to the back of the plane to create a ballast.
Increase angle of touchdown to keep nose off the ground as long as possible
Using brakes on back wheels with moderate/high force as long as possible, etc. etc.

Everyone praised the pilot. He deserves praise, no doubt, but to him, he was doing his job. Those guys live for those situations. (I can say this because I was once married to a pilot.) What gets me is that no one in the news is talking about the REASONS why the landing gear failed. Doing a very quick survey of nose wheel landing gear failures, there's a disturbing trend: it tends to be with Airbus planes. As I'm reading about this, there's some discussion regarding the need for o-ring replacement during maintenance and some consideration of computer and hydraulics, but then there's something a little more obvious: According to what I've read, the nose wheel assembly is somewhat unusual in planes, as it rotates before being retracted into the fuselage. Therefore, one might easily imagine that when it's time to present the nose wheel for landing, it gets stuck. According to the FAA and Howard Plagens, senior safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, failure in the assembly is relatively rare; of the estimated 2,500 Airbus planes, at least 67 incidents have been reported. Using my handy percentage calcuation, that's a 2.7% failure rate. 2.7% is not a high failure, in the world of software. Offhand, I can't find FDA acceptance criteria, but it's not as lenient. FAA will also be much lower, I'd think. NASA? Failure is not an option with those people. Might it not be better to design better, from the start? And might the product be better and perform better if design, engineering, and testing processes were geared toward the same criteria, rather than the "We'll send out a maintenance notice, post-release" of "Please fix our problem where we screwed up"? Would you be ok if your heart surgeon asked you to fix his poor work? Why do we accept and promote this type of poor workmanship in our hardware and software, for business-critical tasks? Related Links