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Malcolm Gladwell On Culture and Airplane Crashes
theodp writes "While the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 pilots' lack of communication puzzles crash investigators, readers of author Malcolm Gladwell are likely having a deja vu moment. Back in 2008, Gladwell dedicated a whole chapter of his then-new book Outliers to Culture, Cockpit Communication and Plane Crashes (old YouTube interview). 'Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s,' Gladwell explained in an interview. 'When we think of airline crashes, we think, Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots. No. What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical. You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S.'"
Normally you would intercept the localizer (lateral guidance), then the glide slope signal (altitude guidance) via auto pilot and then disconnect the auto pilot shortly before landing and flare manually.
On this day, the glide slope signal was not available due to maintenance work and therefore, the pilot flying (PF) needed to fly the approach and landing manually - which he fucked up.
More details on this article from AeroInside.com Coming back to your question - auto land needs to demonstrated per plane on a continous base, e.g. monthly - no matter what weather is.
It's actually the other way around: autoland is typically only used in extremely low visibility (typically bad weather) situations. In most cases, a pilot can land a plane more accurately and smoothly as the human, visually, can account for far more external variables than the autopilot computer.
Just not in this case, apparently...
My sense (IANAP) is an automatic landing would not have been possible given that the Instrument Landing System for runway 28L has been out os service since 1 June.
Correct.
Auto landing uses the full ILS/MLS bundled with a radar altimeter for even more precise altitude information above ground prior to touchdown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland
From wikipedia: The last fatal accident, Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509 in December 1999 led to a review of how Korean cultural attitudes had contributed to its poor crash history. Following the review, Korean Airlines began hiring predominantly Western pilots and since that time safety has greatly improved, and the airline ranks among the best in the 21st century..
It's good they solved it, though it's kind of funny the solution was to hire western pilots..
American pilots had the same problem from the 40 to the 80's or so as the airlines were highering mostly exmilitary who brought with them the command structure of the cockpit.
This was also cited as a primary cause for the Tenerife accident that killed over 500. The Dutch captain pilot was (I think) the most senior pilot in the fleet. He was not to be questioned or your career could be over in a flash.
It wasn't until after Tenerife that the concept of the Crew Resource Management began to be taught.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
He was being sarcastic.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/2013/07/asiana_airlines_crash_stop_blaming_sfo_s_runways_and_korea_s_pilots_for.html
"Lastly, we're hearing murmurs already about the fact that Asiana Airlines hails from Korea, a country with a checkered past when it comes to air safety. Let's nip this storyline in the bud. In the 1980s and 1990s, that country's largest carrier, Korean Air, suffered a spate of fatal accidents, culminating with the crash of Flight 801 in Guam in 1997. The airline was faulted for poor training standards and a rigid, authoritarian cockpit culture. The carrier was ostracized by many in the global aviation community, including its airline code-share partners. But Korean aviation is very different today, following a systemic and very expensive overhaul of the nation’s civil aviation system. A 2008 assessment by ICAO, the civil aviation branch of the United Nations, ranked Korea's aviation safety standards, including its pilot training standards, as nothing less than the highest in the world, beating out more than 100other countries. As they should be, Koreans are immensely proud of this turnaround, and Asiana Airlines, the nation's No. 2 carrier, had maintained an impeccable record of both customer satisfaction and safety."
One simple rule for its versus it's
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