Cactus Flight 1549 and Crew Resource Management

Many of my aviation classes have recently been absorbed in studying the crew resource management (CRM) that was present in the Hudson River ditching of Flight 1549 by Captain Sullenberger and FO Skiles in January of 2009.  While the focus of COM320 is on the cohesion of team members in a small group, the aviation industry has recently become obsessed with the concept of crew resource management (CRM).  Within the industry, CRM is the management of all human assets within the aircraft during flight.  These assets include the captain, first officer, and team of flight attendants.  In this example, the flight crew worked together to land the plane safely and deplane all of the passengers in a timely manner.  In addition to the flight crew, various other resources quickly involved themselves in the incident.  Air traffic controllers from LaGuardia and Teterboro both worked with port authority officers and the flight crew to ensure a safe water landing and a quick response to evacuate the passengers from the plane's wings.

To connect this to COM320, I think its important to note that small groups do not always follow a rigid process of formation; in some cases, a small group is quickly formed, a task is accomplished, then the group disbands.  In the case of Flight 1549, many people quickly banded together to solve a problem.  Each person was interdependent on the others to remedy the best possible solution to the problem.  It seems like most classes are structured in a way that emphasizes the formal group, but I feel as though informal groups that band together simply to accomplish a task are very important and should receive more attention than they currently do.  In this case, the small group that formed in the face of an emergency saved the lives of 150 passengers and 5 crew members.

-Clay Wildt