Here's a great documentary [0] by Errol Morris about the United Flight 232 crash in 1989 [1].

"..the accident is considered a prime example of successful crew resource management due to the large number of survivors and the manner in which the flight crew handled the emergency and landed the airplane without conventional control."

I highly recommend it

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M9TQs-fQR0

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232

Another recent example is Qantas QF32 had an engine explode (fire then catastrophic/uncontained turbine failure) and the A380 landed with one good engine, and two degraded engines. The entire cockpit crew of 5 pilots did a brilliant job in landing the jet.

It's amazing how decisive both pilots are despite the large amount of process going on.

It's like frameworks in programming: it frees brain cycles to focus on what's important

I kind of agree with the conclusion, but I'd look at that from the opposite direction: i.e. just like frameworks, checklists provide a way to avoid some mistakes in repetitive, boring practices. But you'll never avoid them all, and you're going to need a lot of red tape.

Even better to avoid all that and make it idiot proof. I'd rather not be in the situation where my only protection is rigmarole. But sure, as a last resort (just like frameworks) - much better than nothing. Typically in programming, frameworks are premature. A simple api tends to suffice, with checked (or typechecked) inputs and outputs. But sure, if for some reason you can't make that, and you need complex interactions with dynamically generated code, variable number of order-dependant parameters, black-box "magic" base-types, stringly-typed unchecked mini-languages, multiple sequentially dependant calls into the same thing, or any other tricky api you can't (or won't) easily detect misuse for... then a framework is the least-bad amongst bad options.

Thanks for that, this is amazing.

I speak their language (it's German, but people from Switzerland speak a pretty strong dialect) and they discuss highly technical and serious stuff, but their language is just so adorable when they mix the English and the German. I always thought this communication is English only, nowadays?