Couldn't upvote Mike's comment enough. It all comes down to good training, and methodical thinking - something that's generally ingrained in you with aviation.

Couldn't upvote Mike's comment enough. It all comes down to good training, and methodical thinking - something that's generally ingrained in you with aviation. As a skydiving instructor, I've had 3 parachute malfunctions that required cutting away & deploying my reserve. Each time something goes wrong, everything else goes out of focus: you have a problem to solve. You first assess the situation and work to regain control - as long as you have altitude, you have room to work & get creative. When you reach a certain "decision altitude" - or determine there's no way you'll be able to land the parachute safely - you make the decision that you'd do better with a different parachute. And you enact emergency procedures. Beauty of it is, good training makes this automatic. It gives you a decision tree to work off of. IMO, the same sort of decision tree is an excellent thing to think about when crisis planning for companies. But that's another story.