5
FROM THE FOUNDER
Staying calm under fire
Calm leadership under pressure – whether in business, aviation, or racing – proves experience and composure drive effective decision-making.
M y wife has always been stressed out by flying. On flights together, she sits next to me and squeezes my arm so tightly at times I think she is going to bruise me! Thank God for Less Drowsy Dramamine or we would be forced to drive everywhere we wanted to go on vacation or work trips (not that we don’t drive anywhere we can within reason – it’s more fun and we control when we come and go plus have a vehicle when we get there!).
Mark Zweig
Yesterday, she found a little video that she wanted me to watch. It was all about an expert’s evaluation of a Southwest Airlines pilot’s performance in a specific situation. He had an airplane full of people and took off from the Burbank, California, airport. Somewhere around 400-500 feet above the ground, they had a catastrophic engine failure and were down to one of two engines on the airplane. The airplane they were flying could still climb in that condition but at a much slower rate. The pilot immediately reported it to the control tower at Burbank to a quite noticeably agitated air traffic controller who was talking so quickly he was hard to understand. The controller asked if the pilot wanted to return to the airport. But instead, the pilot remained calm and began going through one of many checklists with his copilot as they were trained to do in such situations.
Cutting through to the end of the long account that went into every detail of what happened – after about 20 minutes in the air going through all of their checklists, the pilot decided he would land his plane at LAX versus Burbank because it has longer runways and fewer tall buildings around it. With emergency vehicles at the airport alerted and on standby ready to go, all went according to plan and the pilot landed the airplane with no problem. The moral of the story was to stay calm and remember your training. The timing of her sharing this video was interesting because later in the afternoon we went to meet her Texas cousins – a brother and sister who were in town with their spouses on vacation in our area to ride their adventure touring bikes on some of the fantastic roads we have and visit some of the award-winning
See MARK ZWEIG, page 6
THE ZWEIG LETTER OCTOBER 20, 2025, ISSUE 1606
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