Aviation Motivation Quotes

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.

In a simple world, blame, as a management technique, made sense. When you are on a one-dimensional production line, for example, mistakes are obvious, transparent, and are often caused by a lack of focus. Management can reduce them by increasing the penalties for noncompliance. They can also send a motivational message by getting heavy once in a while. People rarely lose concentration when their jobs are on the line. But in a complex world this analysis flips on its head. In the worlds of business, politics, aviation, and health care, people often make mistakes for subtle, situational reasons. The problem is often not a lack of focus, it is a consequence of complexity. Increasing punishment, in this context, doesn’t reduce mistakes, it reduces openness. It drives the mistakes underground. The more unfair the culture, the greater the punishment for honest mistakes and the faster the rush to judgment, the deeper this information is buried. This means that lessons are not learned, so the same mistakes are made again and again, leading to more punitive punishment, and even deeper concealment and back-covering.

The difference between aviation and health care is sometimes couched in the language of incentives. When pilots make mistakes, it results in their own deaths. When a doctor makes a mistake, it results in the death of someone else. That is why pilots are better motivated than doctors to reduce mistakes.

Glenn Hammond Curtiss was a bicycle enthusiast before he started building motorcycles. Although he only attended grammar school to the 8th grade, his interests motivated him to move on to greater things. In 1904, as a self-taught engineer, he began to manufacture engines for airships. During this time, Curtiss became known for having won a number of international air races and for making the first long-distance flight in the United States. On September 30, 1907, Curtiss was invited to join a non-profit pioneering research program named the “Aerial Experimental Association,” founded under the leadership of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to develop flying machines. The organization was established having a fixed time period, which ended in March of 1909. During this time, the members produced several different aircraft in a cooperative, rather than a competitive, spirit.

While most of the men felt patriotic and even nationalistic attachment to Germany, their motives centered mostly on being able to finally obtain the funding needed to create the rockets all of them dreamed of, as von Braun once explained: “There has been a lot of talk that the Raketenflugplatz finally ‘sold out to the Nazis.’ In 1932, however, when the die was cast, the Nazis were not yet in power, and to all of us Hitler was just another mountebank on the political stage. Our feelings toward the Army resembled those of the early aviation pioneers [...] The issue in these discussions was merely how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.” (Neufeld, 1995, 26).

CORONA showed that using a small team of committed people is the right way to carry out such programs. All experience since then has shown that using accounting systems, business school approaches, and management slogans cannot substitute for a small team of intelligent and highly motivated people.