Southwest Airlines’s dramatic crash landing one week ago was an accident waiting to happen; and it should serve as a warning to us all about imprudent risk management in the airline industry.

PHILADELPHIA, PA — APRIL 17: In this National Transportation Safety Board handout, NTSB investigators examine damage to the CFM International 56-7B turbofan engine belonging Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 that separated during flight Philadelphia International Airport April 17, 2018 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Investigators can't explain with certainty why the left engine in the Boeing 737 malfunctioned but are directing their attention to metal fatigue on fan blades. One woman died during the incident. (Photo by Keith Holloway/National Transportation Safety Board via Getty Images)

During the last decade I have intermittently pointed out important psychological flaws in the cultures at Southwest and for that matter at Boeing too. I wrote about the experiences in both firms in in my book Ending the Management Illusion, which was published ten years ago, and more recently in my books Behavioral Risk Management and Behavioral Corporate Finance.

For the record, in Ending the Management Illusion I also pointed to psychological flaws at BP, noting vulnerability in BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico. Two years after the book was published, Deepwater Horizon exploded off the coast of Louisiana.

In Ending the Management Illusion, I described Southwest as having many strengths, but suggested that the airline had an Achilles' heel, namely weak risk management associated with inspection and maintenance of its aircraft. In this respect, Southwest allowed many of its planes to fly without having been properly inspected to identify possible fractures that could crack open in flight. This was more than a decade ago.

Southwest uses Boeing 737s to fly many short and medium distance flights. These flights feature frequent pressurization and depressurization, processes that place stress on fractures in the bodies of 737s. This kind of flight environment calls for conservative risk management, meaning the allocation of appropriate resources to inspection and maintenance of the airline’s fleet.

For failing to engage in conservative risk management in its inspection and maintenance policy, Southwest was fined by the FAA. Nevertheless, in 2011, the roof on a Southwest plane opened to the skies while in flight. Miraculously, nobody was killed, then. In 2016, an engine fan blade in a Southwest plane disintegrated in flight, nearly causing a crash. Nobody was killed, then. The Southwest accident last week also resulted from the disintegration of an engine fan blade. Only this time, debris broke through the engine casing and shattered a window on the plane, almost bringing the plane down. One passenger died, the first such fatality in the airline's history.

There is now concern about systemic risk in Southwest’s aircraft; and Southwest is not alone when it comes to concerns with the structural integrity of its jet engines. Rolls-Royce engines that power Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner are now on the radar screen as well. By sheer coincidence, on the same day last week as the Southwest accident, FAA officials ruled that Boeing 787 Dreamliners powered by theses engines cannot be flown on extended flights that are over-water.