Cabin crew (or flight attendant) training is a deeply rigorous and challenging process. Biased by unfair and misguided stereotypes (see: “trolley dolly”), people significantly underestimate the responsibility this role necessitates.

As part of my job, I have had the opportunity to recently begin such training. In honesty, I had imagined it would be somewhat of a breeze, and not particularly demanding. Just learning to pour tea, take card payments, and do safety demonstrations (“pull the red tab to inflate, the tube to top up if necessary, and the whistle and light for attracting attention”). How wrong I was.

Potential fires, decompressions, emergency landings, heart-attacks, births, panic-attacks, security issues. The pilots are (understandably) kept rather busy, meaning responsibility for onboard passenger welfare falls solely to the cabin crew.

 In the training, one central message is unwavering – our greatest priority, above all else, is guaranteeing the complete safety of our passengers and colleagues. This is primarily guaranteed by conforming to extremely well-considered standardised norms of practice.

The airline industry is uniquely complex, operating extremely technical machines across international borders, dealing with millions of different passengers, all at 30,000 feet. For these parts to all fit together, standardised procedures within each unique role must be followed to the closest ability. The fundamentality of this was demonstrated, tragically, two weeks ago.

As I’m sure you’ve by now seen, American Airlines Flight No. 5342, from Kansas to Washington D.C., crashed midair with a Black Hawk helicopter during its approach. It crashed into the dark waters of the Potomac River below. The disaster left no survivors, with 60 passengers, four crew members, and three helicopter pilots all losing their lives.

Details are still being established, and no doubt countless reports and inquiries will be published on the subject, but multiple sources have highlighted a deviation from standard operating procedure on the night of the crash. Typically, as I understand it, two people at air traffic control would be respectively responsible for helicopters and planes. At the time of the incident, one person was overseeing them both.

If true, this deviation from procedure could very probably represent the reason 67 people needlessly died. By nature, I have prototypically been inclined to shun protocol. A dispositional cocktail of lethargy, arrogance and things pretty much always turning out alright, means I have often sought to use regulation more as guideline than rule.

In the past two weeks, this has fundamentally shifted for me. In the airline industry, deviation from standard protocol does not mean merely a slipping reputation and a slipping bottom line – it can means the difference between successful trans-Atlantic teleportation and an unnecessary mass casualty event.

The stakes are not as high in many other industries. But whatever you do, I urge you to take pause. Do you work in ways that try to cut corners? Are the rules you successfully bypass actually there for very good reason? And may such deviation cause real harm, be that financial, physical, psychological or organisational, to either yourself or others?

The line between safety and grievous threat are so much thinner than we ordinarily think. Every protocol, no matter how seemingly trivial, represents a lesson learned, often written in the ink of past tragedies.

In a world increasingly driven by efficiency and shortcuts, perhaps a much-neglected truth is that safety protocols are not limitations: they are the foundation upon which excellence is built.