Aircraft crash far less often than hospitals do harm—but only one of them hands out water and apologies when things go wrong.
From Runways to Recovery Rooms is what happens when a flight doctor and an educationist look at hospitals through a cockpit window and can’t stop seeing near misses everywhere. Airlines have quietly turned disasters into checklists, drills and honest debriefs. Hospitals, packed with equally smart, caring people, still rely on heroic memory, WhatsApp orders and “let’s hope this works.”
This book boldly steals aviation’s safety tricks—threat-and-error thinking, the Dirty Dozen, the I’M SAFE check, closed loop communication, HFACS—and smuggles them into OPDs, wards, ICUs, OTs and even billing counters. You’ll see why tired pilots are grounded while tired surgeons are applauded, why a near crash becomes a formal case study but an “almost disaster” on the ward becomes corridor gossip, and how a simple “say it, hear it, confirm it” habit could quietly save more lives than the newest scanner.
It’s not a textbook, and it’s not a tear stained memoir. It’s a sharp, funny field guide for anyone who has ever sat in a hospital waiting room and thought, “If an airline ran like this, nobody would fly it.”
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Wing Commander (Dr) Manav Sharma (Retd), Aarti Sharma
Wing Commander (Dr) Manav Sharma (Retd) is an aerospace‑medicine physician who has spent over 23 years keeping pilots, patients and the occasional VIP alive across cockpits, clinics and conflict zones. He has run award‑winning primary‑care centres as a flight surgeon in the Indian Air Force, planned evacuations from places Google Maps gives up on, contributed to aerospace‑medicine textbooks, and taught human factors at the Institute of Aerospace Medicine, Bengaluru. He now works in the United Arab Emirates, still muttering about checklists and weak safety culture.
Aarti Sharma has spent more than 20 years teaching physics across CBSE, ICSE and IGCSE board curricula and has been Principal of Air Force School Bidar—proof she can manage teenagers and teachers without losing either her sanity or her sense of humour. She also works with the Art of Living foundation to help under‑resourced schools swap chaos for technology‑enabled, structured learning.
Together, they smuggle the best of aviation’s human‑factors and training culture into healthcare— for readers who secretly know that “be more careful” is not a safety strategy; it’s a confession that you don’t have one
