This paper highlights the positive role that human operators often play in preventing small failures and errors from developing into an actual system breakdown. The resulting ‘near misses’ may provide an insight into a powerful alternative to human error prevention, namely: human recovery promotion. Theoretical approaches to modelling error recovery are discussed and translated into empirical research questions. These are partly answered by a number of pilot studies. The main conclusions are that error recovery is much more than simple luck or coincidence, that its root causes can be identified, and that these should have design implications for the technical and organisational context of the human operator’s task.