One thing you’ll notice pretty quickly in aviation is that pilots really like backups.
And backups for backups.
And sometimes a backup for the backup’s backup.
It can feel a little excessive…
Airplanes are built around redundancy. Multiple radios. Multiple navigation sources. Backup instruments. Secondary systems ready to take over if the primary one quits. Multiple pilots! Not because things usually fail, but because when they do, you don’t want that moment to be exciting.
Redundancy doesn’t mean you expect something to break.
It means you expect reality to be unpredictable.
In flying, a single point of failure is something you actively design out of the system. You don’t rely on one tool, one gauge, or one assumption. You layer protection so that if something stops working, the flight keeps going calmly instead of urgently.
It’s thoughtful planning doing its job quietly in the background.
Aviation treats redundancy as a baseline, not an upgrade. That approach shows up in my work more often than you might expect.
