Robert Sumwalt has been a member of the National Transportation Safety Board since 2006. Prior to joining the NTSB, Sumwalt worked as a pilot for Piedmont Airlines and US Airways. At the latter, he worked on special assignment to the flight safety department and also served on the airline's Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA) monitoring team.

He chaired the Air Line Pilots Association's Human Factors and Training Group and co-founded the association's critical incident response program. Sumwalt also spent eight years as a consultant to NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) and has written extensively on aviation safety matters.

There are few people who have this guy's chops when it comes to aviation safety.

Washington, D.C., is a town known for obfuscating, not blunt talk, but that's how Sumwalt typically delivers his message — unvarnished and between the eyes. This summer, he delivered the keynote address at the Flight Safety Foundation's annual dinner where he took aim at what he considers the number one cause of aviation accidents: leadership failure.

"I've seen so many cases where a failure of leadership led to a bad outcome," Sumwalt told his audience. "Sometimes that leadership failure is in the cockpit, sometimes it is on the shop floor, but quite often, the leadership failures can be traced back to senior management and even the board of directors.

"How many times have you heard someone say 'safety is our top priority'? Whenever I hear that, I just shake my head. Why? Usually, it's just rhetoric. And, besides, priorities come and go. When I was an airline, for example, a new president would come in say 'on-time performance is our top priority.' A few years later, another president would arrive and announce 'customer service is our top priority.' And, once that guy left, the new president would come in and proclaim 'the airline's priority is becoming more mean and lean financially,' so everything we did was driven by lowering costs."

"Priorities come and go," Sumwalt continued. "Therefore, safety shouldn't be just a priority it must be a core value that drives everything you do. I'm not saying safety is the only value you should have certainly it would be expected to have other values such as providing excellent customer service, using ethical business practices, and being a good steward of the environment. But, in successful organizations, everything you do is run through the filter of your core values to make sure you are being true to them ... As a leader, your role is to ensure that your organization has safety as a core value and, most importantly, the organization lives those values."

Making safety a core value, showing your employees that nothing matters more to your organization than their lives and the lives of your customers, has other advantages.

Paul O'Neill served as U.S. Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush, but back in 1987 he was hired to turn around Alcoa Aluminum. His first order of business wasn't cutting costs or revamping the product line it was a rigorous program to improve worker safety and ingrain it into the corporate culture. Wall Street thought the man was nuts, but within a year the accident rate had been slashed, and posted profits were at an all-time high.

Focusing on safety eventually made it easier to change the company culture when it came to manufacturing efficiency. O'Neill understood that safety is moral responsibility and also good business.