On December 29, 2006, passengers of American Airlines’ Flight 1348 were confined in a parked aircraft for eight hours. By this time, “The toilets on the American Airlines jet were overflowing. There was no water to be found and no food except for a box of pretzel bags.” This fiasco was an easily foreseeable result of the airline’s apparent attitude toward quality, as might be perceived from CEO Gerard J. Arpey’s letter to Quality Digest magazine, written some time prior to this incident. The letter took issue with Quality Digest columnist James Harrington’s criticism “Of airline quality in general, and specifically that of American Airlines.” It stated in part, “We carry about a quarter of a million people every day, and, inevitably, there will be mistakes that impact our customers.” The attitude that mistakes are “inevitable” is inconsistent with modern quality science, and it fosters an organizational culture in which otherwise-avoidable mistakes do indeed become inevitable.

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