Commercial air travel is one of the safest modes of transportation that we have. But for all of air travel’s safety advances, the world witnessed the horrifying crashes of two Boeing 737 MAXs, which led to the deaths of a total of 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018 and 2019.
While it’s difficult to pinpoint just one thing that could have prevented these catastrophes, we do know that going forward, the likelihood of these incidents is significantly reduced when we allow insiders with critical safety intelligence to come forward and share their concerns with regulatory bodies.
The auto industry learned this the hard way. Two decades ago, an employee of Japanese manufacturer Takata named Mark Lillie became aware that the company planned to use volatile ammonium nitrate in its airbag inflators as a cost-saving measure. This was the same explosive used in the Oklahoma City bombing, and it is very unsuitable for use in airbag inflators. When Takata executives ignored the explicit warnings raised by Lillie and several employees internally, Lillie felt he had no choice but to resign from Takata. Since Lillie’s resignation in 2001, these faulty airbags–which could violently explode and shoot shrapnel into vehicle occupants–have led to more than two dozen deaths and hundreds of serious injuries.
As the death toll began to mount, Lillie looked for a way to disclose what he knew. Without an external government program to report these sorts of safety infractions, Lillie...
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