Aviation History Month: TapRooT® Summit Highlights

In November of 1783, the first manned hot air balloon took flight, and began a long history of brave and brilliant aviators that continues to this day. For this reason, November is Aviation History Month, a month to recognize these great aviators’ achievements and turn our eyes to the development of aviation going forward. This year, our 2025 TapRooT® Global Summit hosted two excellent aviators for speakers, and in honor of Aviation History Month, we want to highlight their inspiring stories.

Erika Armstrong

Erika Armstrong is the author of A Chick in the Cockpit: My Life Up in the Air and an aviation professor at MSU Denver. She has flown twenty-eight different types of aircraft and has been a pilot and captain for many different organizations, from corporate airlines to the Red Cross. She owns an aviation consulting business and is an expert witness for high profile aviation cases. In summary, she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to aviation.

This year, Erika led the session “Training Beyond the Mistake,” which focused on the inevitability of the unexpected when working in dangerous fields. She went into great detail about what constitutes as good training, and how training can make a difference in the moment of the unexpected. While employees are trained to do things right the first time, they may not know what they are meant to do when something goes wrong, leading to people freezing up or making further mistakes. In aviation, this is not an option. Training employees to react to mistakes well and recover with excellence can make a significant difference in a workplace’s incident count.

Erika has been one of our return speakers, and she always puts forth engaging and well-researched ideas about how to make systems run more and more effectively.

Kim “KC” Campbell

Retired US Air Force Colonel Kim “KC” Campbell was our keynote speaker at this Summit, her talk titled “Flying in the Face of Fear: Lessons on Leading with Courage.” In 2003, Kim was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for Heroism after successfully recovering her battle-damaged airplane when she was nearly shot down over Iraq. In her talk, she described how her courage in that situation came from recognizing and utilizing fear to make smarter decisions, rather than ignoring or letting fear consume her in the moment of a dangerous incident.

Kim has also written the bestselling book “Flying in the Face of Fear: A Fighter Pilot’s Lessons on Leading with Courage.” She writes that fear can prevent us from achieving success or lead us to a more significant growth path if we harness that fear effectively. Beyond just fighter pilots, everyone must have the courage to persevere through challenges, do the hard thing, and act even in fear. When we act in critical moments and persevere despite the difficulty, we are positioned to create a culture of courage and an environment of trust that builds deeper relationships, inspires loyalty, and enables our team to perform at their best.

Her storytelling at this year’s Summit put everyone into her mindset in that cockpit over Iraq. We were all reminded of how necessary it is to prepare ourselves for the strong, even paralyzing emotions that can arise in the midst of an emergency.

Lessons Learned

The field of aviation is a challenging one, and has been so since the beginning. In the air, decisions become life and death, and high reliability is a necessity, not just a goal. As both of our aviation Summit speakers have discussed, good training focuses on a culture of trust; not just trusting the other people on your team, but trusting yourself to make the right decisions in the midst of an emergency. Humans make mistakes, but many of the biggest mistakes in aviation come from moments of panic. When we trust our own ability to do things correctly, and our team to support us, we can use that fear as adrenaline to complete the task at hand rather than letting it cripple us.

While heavily present in the field of aviation, this method of training beyond the mistake is an important lesson to learn in every field. Learn how to apply a trust culture to your company with the TapRooT® System by contacting us for a free executive briefing here.