Avoid the crash: Understanding your workplace Mayday

A homophone of May Day (mayday), comes from the French phrase m’aidez, which means help me. It was coined in the 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford, a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport. At the time, a lot of air traffic was between England and France, so they wanted a distress call that both English and French crews could understand easily.

You’re going to have to trust me, but this story will make sense…

41,000 feet above Canada, silence fell inside the cockpit of Air Canada Flight 143. Captain Robert Pearson and First Officer Maurice Quintal locked eyes, their faces pale. The unthinkable had just happened.

Their Boeing 767, carrying 69 people, was out of fuel.

Just moments earlier, they’d dismissed a low fuel-pressure warning as a minor technical issue, a faulty pump or indicator. Gravity would feed the engine just fine, they figured. But then the second engine gave the same warning. Shortly after, the left engine died.

No cause for panic – yet. A 767 can fly just fine on a single engine. But then, with a chilling bong, the cockpit warning system went off again.

And then… nothing.

Silence. Both engines were dead. The aircraft had become the world’s largest (and heaviest) glider.

There wasn’t even a procedure for this situation in their manuals.

Thankfully, even commercial jets don’t just fall out of the sky when they run out of fuel and can glide in a descent for a long distance. As a stroke of luck, Pearson, it turned out, was an avid glider pilot in his spare time. Without the engines turning, they had no power and no electrics to power their indicators, so he guessed the best glide speed and angle of descent. Quintal checked the numbers. They couldn’t make the nearest commercial airport, Winnipeg.

But Quintal remembered Gimli – a decommissioned RCAF base where he once served. It was within range. Issuing a Mayday call, the crew aimed for it.

What they didn’t know was that Gimli was no longer a military airfield – it was now a racetrack and recreational area, home to families, motorsport events… and two kids on bikes, casually riding up and down the runway.

As Pearson brought the plane in with no engines, no electrical systems, partial landing gear – it looked like disaster was inevitable. But through a series of extraordinary manoeuvres, including a glider-style forward slip, Pearson managed to land the aircraft just in time to avoid hitting the two boys.

Everyone survived. Barely.

Later, an investigation revealed the root cause: a unit conversion error. The plane had been fuelled using pounds instead of kilograms. A simple miscommunication. The numbers were correct-but the context was wrong.

It wasn’t just a numbers problem. It was a meaning problem.

The ground crew had numbers. The pilots had data. But no one questioned whether those numbers reflected the reality they were operating in.

Now think about how many organisations do the exact same thing with their people.

Most businesses measure engagement. They send surveys. They crunch scores. They look at dashboards and smile when the metrics look “fine”.

But people aren’t just rational beings ticking boxes and rating their job satisfaction. We’re emotional, instinctive, reflective and rational. And frustratingly, most “employee listening” tools don’t listen to that part of us… 

They measure what’s easy to quantify – the “rational” brain. But they miss the reflexive systems that reveal how people truly feel. And that’s why a company can show strong engagement scores… and still have a culture where people are quietly burning out, emotionally checked out, or screaming Mayday behind forced smiles. Just like Air Canada Flight 143, you can be flying high, thinking everything is fine…until suddenly it’s not!

That’s what sets The Happiness Index apart! We use neuroscience to help you understand how your people are feeling and thinking. This takes the guesswork out of your employee listening data with actionable insights that give you a clear path forward.

The lesson?

Measure what matters-but more importantly, understand what your measurements really mean.

Data without context is just noise.

Just as Pearson and Quintal needed more than numbers to land safely, leaders need more than metrics to build healthy, human organisations. You need an understanding of what drives your people beneath the surface. If you don’t understand what makes them feel safe, valued, inspired, or on edge, then you aren’t measuring the right things; you’re just getting numbers.

To really understand how your people think, feel and behave, you need to measure how people experience your culture, not just how they rationalise it.

The glider landed. But it shouldn’t have had to.

Your organisation shouldn’t need a crisis to realise it’s running out of fuel.

If you want to discover how The Happiness Index can help you avoid your May Day moment, then check out our services.

If you’re ready to talk now, so are we!