John Goerzen is a staff engineer at Fastly, and an amateur pilot. In this episode, we talk about some of the parallels between aviation and IT, as it relates to risk management, incident response, and the mentalities that can lead to problems. We discuss the concept of an accident chain; the idea that most incidents don't have a single cause, but a long list of contributing causes. We discuss the importance of blameless postmortems for improving how we respond to failures, and the human aspect of incident prevention.