>"What's unique is the partial failure, it's never happened," he said. "This isn't a drill you can run."
The unspoken part you have to hear there is "... within the economic model of the airline business".
Business continuity gets exponentially more expensive as you chase the blackest of swans: the sheer volume of plan development and maintenance, developing exercises, table-top vs. walkthrough vs. simulation, assumptions about how many different uncorrelated failures you're prepared for deal with at once etc.
I've no doubt you could run an airline to be as resilient as (say) USAF Air Mobility Command, but no-one could afford the tickets.
What's ironic here is that groups like USAF are constantly pressured to adopt private industry models to be more "economically efficient" and completely ignoring that resiliency is a requirement baked into the high cost. I understand why both take the approaches they do but it seems everyone holds private industry barely running with no resiliency optimizations above all else, which don't make sense in all contexts. Corner cutting is fine in many contexts, especially when you know the side effects of their failures which may be quite insignificant.
The unspoken part you have to hear there is "... within the economic model of the airline business".
Business continuity gets exponentially more expensive as you chase the blackest of swans: the sheer volume of plan development and maintenance, developing exercises, table-top vs. walkthrough vs. simulation, assumptions about how many different uncorrelated failures you're prepared for deal with at once etc.
I've no doubt you could run an airline to be as resilient as (say) USAF Air Mobility Command, but no-one could afford the tickets.