As reported by various media outlets, a Falcon 50 business jet, carrying the CEO of the French oil company Total (Christophe de Margerie), collided with a snowplow on take-off close to midnight on the evening of Monday, October 20, 2014 at an airport near Moscow. Despite an engine fire and fuselage damage, the pilot was able to bring the aircraft around for a landing. The early reports indicate, however, that the landing gear collapsed upon the hard landing and the aircraft then overturned and was engulfed in flames. The passenger and three crew members all perished.

Aviation, in general, has become orders of magnitude safer over the past 50 years. Nevertheless, human error continues to be a significant cause of aircraft accidents. There are several possible explanations for the tragedy in Moscow. Some examples: The snowplow driver thought he/she was on an inactive runway; the pilot took off from the wrong runway; air traffic control cleared the plane to depart from the wrong runway. The bottom line, however, is that this accident was the result of human error.

This sad event harkens back to Comair Flight 5191 and Singapore Airlines Flight 006. In the Comair accident (August 27, 2006), the crew accidentally departed from a very short runway at Lexington, Kentucky (used by small non-commercial aircraft) and plowed into the woods instead of becoming airborne. 49 out of the 50 people on board perished. In the Singapore Airlines crash (October 31, 2000), the crew of the 747 accidentally turned onto a runway that had construction equipment about halfway down its length (the first portion of the runway had been temporarily re-designated as a taxiway). Visibility was extremely poor due to very heavy rain and winds (there was a typhoon in the region). After the plane hit the concrete construction barriers and heavy equipment, it broke up and burst into flames. 83 out of the 179 people on board perished.

There have been recent efforts in aviation (and other fields) to set up cross-checking protocols and procedures. The assumption is that people will make mistakes occasionally and a good way to prevent a mistake from escalating into an incident, accident or tragedy is to ensure that someone else is double-checking a given person’s work. Unfortunately, this is not already standard practice in all safety-critical disciplines. For example, only recently have checklists, long a common practice in aviation, started to be used in the medical field. Surgeons have historically been treated like, and some act like, demigods. To these folks the notion of a checklist is akin to accusing them of incompetence. Nevertheless, even the most incredibly intelligent, highly skilled and highly trained person can make a mistake.

The accident in Moscow is a grim reminder that we humans need to recognize our fallibility and we need to be putting mechanisms in place to catch small mistakes before they add up to catastrophes.