Whether it’s a result of enemy fire or engine failure, in an emergency fighter pilots’ lives depend on the survival kit that military experts pack with the essentials a pilot needs to stay alive until help arrives.What are the takeaways from a fighter pilot’s survival kit that you can apply to your disaster plan?It shouldn’t require maintenance. Survival kits include canned water because no one expects a pilot to remember to refresh a canteen before every mission. Survival gear and disaster plans that require maintenance risk letting you down if you forget to maintain them. Computer backups based on removable media are only as good as your discipline in putting in fresh media. An automatic system that backs up onto a remote Internet server removes the element of human discipline.Too heavy a kit may leave you looking for excuses not to carry it “just this one time.” Your office may have five computers, but if your plan includes a complete set of redundant computers to use in a disaster, the cost may keep you from executing your plan. One backup computer stored in a remote location may be enough to keep a skeleton crew working through a disaster until you can buy more replacements and won’t be such a burden that you don’t do anything at all.It includes a survival manual. When disaster strikes, you will have too much on your mind to recall every detail of the great plan you had in your head but never wrote down. No plan is complete until you document it.They have an expiration date. Eventually, even the canned water becomes undrinkable and needs to be replaced. Look at your plan annually to consider changes in your business that would require you to change your disaster plan.

Most of them never get used. One reason that survival kits are lightweight is that the temptation to leave the “I probably won’t need it” survival kit behind increases in direct proportion to its weight. It’s human nature: The greater the burden, the more likely an activity with an uncertain payoff will be postponed. So design your disaster plan to be good enough to keep you alive until help arrives without being such a burden that you end up postponing it to death.

For more about pilots’ survival kits, visit http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=1400. For more about reps’ survival kits, read carefully through this issue of Agency Sales magazine.