"When you design it, think how you would feel if you had to fly it! Safety first!"
About this Quote
Design, for Douglas, isn’t an abstract exercise in elegance or efficiency; it’s a moral test with a cockpit door. “Think how you would feel if you had to fly it” turns engineering from a spreadsheet argument into embodied accountability. It’s a simple empathy prompt, but in aviation that empathy is sharpened into something like oath-taking: if you wouldn’t trust your own hands and bones to this machine, you have no right to ask strangers to.
The line lands with extra force in Douglas’s context. Early- to mid-20th-century aviation was equal parts innovation and funeral procession, a world where “good enough” could mean catastrophic. Douglas Aircraft helped define commercial flight’s expansion, when passengers were being convinced to trade rail safety for airspeed. “Safety first” isn’t just a slogan; it’s a business strategy and a public contract. Reliability is what turns flight from stunt to infrastructure.
There’s also a quiet rebuke here to the temptations that haunt every era of tech: optimization culture, cost-cutting, and the thrill of pushing performance past prudence. Douglas doesn’t name management pressure or market competition, but you can hear them in the imperative tone. He frames safety not as a regulatory checkbox but as a designer’s identity: your credibility is proportional to the risk you’re willing to personally absorb.
It works because it collapses distance. The future pilot’s fear becomes the present engineer’s problem, and that psychological swap is how “safety” stops being an abstraction and starts being design.
The line lands with extra force in Douglas’s context. Early- to mid-20th-century aviation was equal parts innovation and funeral procession, a world where “good enough” could mean catastrophic. Douglas Aircraft helped define commercial flight’s expansion, when passengers were being convinced to trade rail safety for airspeed. “Safety first” isn’t just a slogan; it’s a business strategy and a public contract. Reliability is what turns flight from stunt to infrastructure.
There’s also a quiet rebuke here to the temptations that haunt every era of tech: optimization culture, cost-cutting, and the thrill of pushing performance past prudence. Douglas doesn’t name management pressure or market competition, but you can hear them in the imperative tone. He frames safety not as a regulatory checkbox but as a designer’s identity: your credibility is proportional to the risk you’re willing to personally absorb.
It works because it collapses distance. The future pilot’s fear becomes the present engineer’s problem, and that psychological swap is how “safety” stops being an abstraction and starts being design.
Quote Details
| Topic | Engineer |
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