In this talk, we examine the failures of modern airline operations – from United Airlines flight 173 in 1978, to Air France flight 447 in 2009 and First Air flight 6560 in 2011 – and how the NTSB investigation and aftermath has dramatically improved flight safety. We take those lessons learned in disaster recovery and analysis, teamwork, task saturation, and systems design and apply them to modern software application and infrastructure architecture at scale to achieve higher availability, reduced errors, and more scalable systems.