 |
| Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin |
"Two is one, and one is none."
—A military adage
U.S. President Donald J. Trump was on his way to Davos, Switzerland, on January 21, 2026, to speak at the World Economic Forum when a "minor electrical issue" forced Air Force One to return to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. The lights in the press cabin went out briefly.
A decision to return to Joint Base Andrews was made "out of an abundance of caution," said presidential press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
The president and his party, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the traveling press corps, were transferred to two different planes for the 7.5-hour flight to Zurich.
Referring to Air Force One, the plane's name when the president's on board, former head of the National Transportation Safety Board, Mary Schiavo, said, "This has to be one of the best-maintained planes in the world. But there are things on every aircraft where when the warning light comes on, you have to turn around and go back to address it."
That advice applies to everyone: don't ignore the warning lights.
Swiss cheese explained
The lush valley in western Switzerland known as Emmental, about an hour and a half or 121km from Zurich, is the birthplace of Swiss cheese, according to Wisconsincheese.com. The website describes this as an "alpine-style" cheese made in high-altitude pastures.
When Swiss immigrants arrived in Green County, Wisconsin, in the late 1800s, they brought cheesemaking techniques with them. And we're all glad they did.
Why does Swiss cheese have holes?
Historians at the association say it's due to the cheesemaking process, which slowly releases carbon dioxide, forming small pockets of air called "eyes" during aging.
Holes and slices
The Theory of Active and Latent Failures was proposed by James Reason, Ph.D., a psychology professor from the University of Manchester, in his book, Human Errors. Dr. Reason's initial interest was in complex systems, such as healthcare.
His thesis was that accidents are caused by a breakdown or absence of safety barriers across four levels within the sociotechnical system: Unsafe Acts, Pre-Conditions for Unsafe Acts, Supervisory Factors, and Organizational Influences.
The Swiss Cheese Model is a popular expression of Dr. Reason's work, as absent or failed barriers at each level are represented as holes in the cheese.
Post-accidents are evaluated by identifying which slice of the Swiss cheese broke down and mitigating their recurrence.
The U.S. government admitted in a court filing last year that it was partially at fault in a midair collision between American Eagle flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that killed 67 people on January 29, 2025. The CRJ-700 passenger jet, owned by PSA Airlines, was attempting to land on runway 33 at Washington's Ronald Reagan National Airport.
The role of redundancy
In the Swiss cheese model, the holes represent weaknesses in individual parts of the system, and they continually vary in size and position across the slices. The system produces failures when holes in each slice momentarily align, permitting, in Dr. Reason's words, "a trajectory of accident opportunity."
Which calls for redundancies.
"Redundancy in aviation refers to the duplication of critical components or systems to enhance reliability, usually through a backup or failsafe. This ensures that if one part of the system fails, others can take over its function without compromising safety," say the experts at Melbourne Flight Safety.
"The key areas are avionics, power, and flight control systems," they note.
Even with redundancy in the cockpit on general aviation and flight decks for larger aircraft, pilot error accounts for 60% to 80% of all incidents, according to the NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration. Mechanical failure and weather conditions are also important factors.
Commercial air travel remains the statistically safest mode of transportation, with fatality rates near zero per 100 million passenger miles, says the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
What other types of systems require backups?
Power grids, water supply systems, communication networks, such as data centers, and transportation infrastructure, like additional highways, bridges, and tunnels.
As someone said, "We're all connected, and we're all vulnerable."
One other category to consider is succession plans, which are a form of strategic redundancy. "They are designed to ensure business continuity and reduce dependence on any single individual. Normally, redundancy implies elimination, but in this case, it means backup," suggests CPA firm, Moss Adams.
Murphy's Law
Sean Gold, the founder of TruePrepper in North Carolina, says that "The 'two is one and one is none' idea means that you should expect one thing to go wrong with equipment, survival gear, plans, and even people."
"Even the most careful plans and robust equipment need backups," Gold emphasizes.
KCRA TV in Sacramento, California, reported that three survivors of the deadly avalanche near Castle Creek used their avalanche safety gear to rescue fellow skiers buried in snow. Six members of the group survived while nine died. It was the deadliest avalanch in modern California history.
There's a relationship here with an epigram known as Murphy's Law, "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." Yet sometimes the biggest risk is doing nothing.
Nevertheless, the goal of preventing accidents and not repeating bad decisions is achieved by taking the time to learn from past mistakes and institutionalizing those findings.
A visible example of that principle is the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion forty years ago, which occurred on January 28, 1986, and took the lives of seven crew members just 73 seconds into the launch, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.
The lessons there — don't yield to internal management pressure and don't launch in cold temperatures — may partly explain why NASA rolled back the Artemis II moon rocket to its hangar last month so engineers could look for possible helium leaks.
Learning from the past and utilizing timely knowledge are ways to keep the cultural, systemic, and mechanical holes from aligning. Think about that the next time you're enjoying a slice of Swiss cheese.
Strategist.com
© Bredholt & Co.
