I love airplanes and I'm deeply fascinated by them. Perhaps, it's because I grew up hearing stories about planes and flew in them very early as a kid, mostly for free. At the time, my dad worked for the defunct Nigerian Airways and also Richard Branson's Virgin Nigeria and Virgin Atlantic (although not as a pilot).
Indeed, you guessed right, my first career choice as a kid was to be a pilot. But my father thought that was too risky a profession, so I ended up saying I'll do aeronautics instead. This dream never materialized, but that's a story for another day.
Aside from my dad's airplane stories, one incident that strongly influenced my early career choices (piloting and aeronautics) was hearing about the death of one of the musicians I loved while growing up. If you escaped being a Gen-Z like me and grew up listening to R&B, you must have listened to Aaliyah, at least once. It's a sad and tragic story that I probably shouldn't share, but I'll come back to it in a moment.
Why do airplanes need a runway? For the same reasons why startups need a sizable enough runway to survive. An airplane's wings can't automatically generate enough lift to overcome the body's weight and take off from the ground, unless the airplane is moving at a certain speed before attempting to fly. The pilot needs a long, flat surface area (runway) to be able to build momentum and get up to the speed level that's just enough for the plane to clear the runway and takeoff.
Some 22 years ago, Aaliyah and her music crew flew into the Bahamas in a Cessna 404 aircraft to shoot some parts of the video for her song "Rock the Boat." Their return flight to Miami was scheduled for the next day, but they finished filming earlier than expected, so Aaliyah and her crew requested an aircraft to fly back to the US on the same day.
Within two hours of placing their request, a much lighter Cessna 402, which was smaller than the Cessna 404 they originally arrived on, landed in the Bahamas to pick them up. However, when Aaliyah saw the size of the plane, she was skeptical and refused to board. She was feeling unwell and had a headache, so she decided to take sleeping pills and rest in the back of a cab, leaving her crew to sort out the flight issues.
As Aaliyah had suspected, the pilot also warned that the plane would be overloaded if they made the trip. It would be carrying one more passenger than it was certified to carry alongside all their filming equipment, making the flight unsafe. But as we'll later learn, the pilot lacked enough flying experience to stand his ground and make the right call, so some of Aaliyah's crew convinced him to fly them anyway.
The pilot fraudulently obtained his FAA license by showing hundreds of flight hours without ever flying, in fact, it was his first time flying an aircraft, and traces of cocaine and alcohol were later found in his system. The flight took off at 6:50 pm that day (August 25, 2001), headed for Miami with Aaliyah who was deep asleep and eight other passengers aboard. In less than a minute after takeoff, the 700-pound overloaded aircraft crashed into flames barely 60m from the south-end of the airport's runway, killing everyone aboard.
Going back to our startup and runway analogy, having a sizable enough runway isn't just what it takes for your startup to survive. What's the size of your crew (team) and how fast are you burning through your runway? When it really matters, can you and your team make the right tradeoffs and pivotal decisions? Are you measuring the right product and revenue metrics that will influence your bottom line? I can keep the questions coming if you don't mind.