For the first time in decades an airline has been kicked off a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation process. The NTSB has bumped American Airlines for its breach of protocol in the investigation of its jet sliding 600 feet past the runway at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming airport. AA removed the infamous “black boxes†from the jet and downloaded data before turning them over to the NTSB. The data were not compromised, and AA assures that it was not attempting to circumvent the investigation. AA can talk itself blue with a “Trust us†message and perception will move nary an inch. This breach of protocol, a violation of the rules put in place to ensure the integrity of airline incident investigations, is more than just an internal snafu. The lesson for companies here is to be sure employees understand that they are to follow the rules and help them to do so by explaining WHY we follow seemingly innocuous rules. AA employees who did the downloading are probably wondering, “How could anyone think that I would ever tamper with the data where safety is involved?â€Â
WE will give the employees that level of integrity, but the issue is not their integrity. The issue is simply following the rules. Hindsight bias kicks in when you are the center of an investigation and you depart from a decades-old step-by-step policy for that investigation. Violate the rules and you scramble to explain yourself even if you didn’t do what folks assume you did. Procedural rules in this situation protect the chain of custody: that the information came off the planes and went to the federal agency without a pit stop in the airline’s computers. No matter how AA explains or how many internal investigations it conducts, perception trumps reality. And AA lost its seat at the investigation table.