On March 10, 1989, an Air Ontario Fokker F-28 with four crewmembers and 65 passengers on board crashed shortly after takeoff from Dryden (Ontario, Canada) Municipal Airport during a heavy snow squall.1 The captain and first officer, one of two flight attendants and 21 passengers were killed. The accident investigation commission focused partly on the pre-takeoff reluctance of the two cabin crewmembers to inform the flight crew about passenger concerns that the wings needed to be deiced.
Results from the author’s 2011 survey of 263 flight attendants (see, “More Than a Door”) and 2012 survey of 264 airline pilots suggest that issues revealed by such reluctance continue to impede safety-related communication between these work groups.
As passengers boarded Air Ontario Flight 1363 at Dryden for its next leg to Winnipeg, snow was falling, increasing in intensit…
