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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.'"
As an American, it made no sense to me that a person would consider that the respect towards their superior was worth more than the lives of two hundred people.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
It's starting to seem likely that there was gross human error involved, but let's wait to see what else comes out from the investigation before blaming it all on East Asian culture.
Is the 777 one of those planes which cannot be landed fully automatically? What are the current FAA rules about auto-landings? I thought planes were generally supposed to use manual landing only under severe weather or other concerns.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Indian culture is hierarchical, and deference to your superiors counts enormously. Yet, Indian airlines do not have worse-than-average crash rates.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
>You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S
Bzzt - out of date (see what happens if you blow a whistle on your 'elders and superiors' in the US - or indeed in most western governments).
All your ghosts are just false positives.
And still land the plane without damaging it or passengers. America F*ck yea!
Right - Americans certainly wouldn't show inordinate deference to superiors. They just drink 16 rum and diet cokes the night before they fly. http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/worlds-dumbest-pilots/8
Ouch. You're arguing with drinking against Americans in a comment to an article about pilots from a country where being an alcoholic is almost a job requirement in many corporations? Epic fail.
Ezekiel 23:20
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..
TAWS computer: SINK RATE!!
pilot: You're a 777 so that makes you about 18 years old. why dont you show some respect.
TAWS computer: TOO LOW!!! TERRAIN!!
pilot: you kids think you know everything. back in my day we didnt shout at our elders.
TAWS computer: PULL UP!!! PULL UP!!! PULL UP!!!
pilot: get off my damn lawn.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Indian culture is hierarchical, and deference to your superiors counts enormously. Yet, Indian airlines do not have worse-than-average crash rates.
From this site:
Accident rates:
Air India Rate - 6.82
Korean Air rate - 5.38
Delta Air rate - 0.3
Now he can tell us why we should turn back regulation on smoking and give big banks even more money.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a-look-into-the-life-work-of-americas-most-successful-propagandist.html
And what a crock -- that Koreans would crash a plane because of a respect of hierarchy. This is just racist. Sorry, I take that back. It's just stupid.
Korean Air fixed its problems a decade ago, not by changing the culture of Korea, but by instituting appropriate policies.
If Asiana hasn't (and that's yet to be established) then that's Asiana's problem, not Korea's.
Back in the late 80s, I worked in Korea, and obtained my private pilots license at the Osan air base aero club. I flew off and on for several years between '87 and 94, with an instructor who had left the club to work for KAL, and returned a year later. He raised this exact issue as one of the reasons for his departure. Respect for elders is deeply engrained in Korean cultural. So much so, that younger pilots were unwilling to point out errors to older ones. While I wish we had a bit more respect for ours in the U.S., this has no place in a cockpit.
Disclaimer: This is in no way meant as an offense to Koreans (I was married, and have a kid with one).
Just another day in Paradise
At all of the companies I've worked for we have keyed entry doors all over the place. However, the social norm is that you hold doors open for people thus completely breaking this form of security. There's always some email once a year that asks us not to do this but breaking social protocol simply can't be done, they need to change the security method entirely if they want it to work.
Going slightly off topic, but still on the topic of the crash, I'm getting sick of hearing how this was a "miracle". It cheapens the word to say so. I would say it was fortunate that it wasn't worse. The plane could have flipped over instead of spinning. The contact with the sea wall could have been worse. There are lots of things left to chance. But, overall, these kind of crashes tend to be pretty survivable these days. Calling it a "miracle" cheapens the amount of effort that goes into preparation for this sort of thing, and also tends to give you this sense that it's not your responsibility to do better.
There's a reason that people can get off the planes in 90 seconds. There's a reason that the fuel doesn't get spread all over the runway in a crash like this. There's a reason that the interior takes longer to catch fire than your sofa would under the same circumstances. It was engineered that way. The plane costs many millions of dollars more than it needs to in order to fly for just these reasons. There were fire trucks and fire fighters just sitting around getting paid doing nothing, just in case something like this happened.This was planning, and the willingness to spend large amounts of money and effort to protect human life. Plus a bit of luck. But not a miracle.
i thought U.S. also has hierarchical culture? Upper class, middle class, lower class? respect your elders, open the door for them? give up your seat for elderly person with a cane? i call older people in the U.S. Mister or Misses. 20 year olds call me sir. parents tell their children what to do. kids follow the parent's instructions in United States of America. am i missing something?
"Communication is only possible between equals."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The 777 trainee was the one landing the plane. Presumably, with a couple thousand fewer flight hours than the other captain, he would be younger and/or lower on the corporate totem pole. We have not been told anything to the contrary.
Not necessarily. The "trainee" had nearly 10,000 hours as a pilot, just not in 777s. For other than small planes, you get type rated (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating) by someone who's more experienced in that type of aircraft. That person could easily be younger than this pilot, who was simply trying to add another type of certification.
Just another day in Paradise
According to the airline, a senior colleague with more experience landing 777s, including at San Francisco, sat beside him as co-pilot.
and "Ultimately, it’s the trainer pilot who is responsible for the flight,” Mr. Yoon, the Asiana president, said, referring to Lee Jeong-min, 49, the more experienced pilot who sat in the co-pilot’s seat when Lee Kang-guk was landing the plane. He had 3,220 hours of flying time with 777s.
These are from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/world/asia/asiana-airlines-san-francisco-plane-crash.html?_r=0
Gladwell is an idiot. He makes bogus theories that sound interesting to people that don't think too hard about them. As an added benefit, these ideas have zero proof behind them. It's like TV punditry in book form. Every time somebody uses the phrase 'tipping point' I want to puke.
Good article here, from someone who appears to know what they are talking about: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/2013/07/asiana_airlines_crash_stop_blaming_sfo_s_runways_and_korea_s_pilots_for.2.html
So to speak.
Airbus's autopilots are already capable of taking off and landing autonomously. No idea of Boeings can, but I'd assume they either already can or could.
I'd personally rather see the pilots taken out of the loop. Computers can't get tired, can't get drunk.
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
"...deferential toward your ... superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S."
Unimaginable? I think not. At least one Thiokol engineer said "don't fly" which was definitely not deferential to his "superiors" i.e. management. IIRC he got fired even tho he was right. All the other engineers were appropriately deferential, continued to be employed, & 7 people died.
First, this isn't something that is unique to Korean or East Asian societies. Western nations, including the supposedly more egalitarian United States, had the exact same problem of cockpit hierarchy through the 1970s. Only after the crash of United Airlines Flight 173 did the West begin reorganize the way it trains its pilots, leading to the implementation of Cockpit Resource Management which retrained the way American aircrews operated.
Second, it should also be noted that Korean Air underwent similar reorganization following the 1999 Guam accident, leading to an effectively accident free record 14 years onward even with a crew of primarily Korean pilots. So you can wave all this nonsense about cultural hierarchy and whatnot, but in the end, it's more a matter of training and personnel organization.
In a broader view, this sort of hierarchical issue is less a unique problem to Korean society and more a problem of managing a chain of command. You see these sorts of problems all the time in the West: operating rooms, military units, etc. I would even argue that the real problem was that both the American pilots and Korean ones are all former Air Force pilots, used to operating in strictly hierarchical cultures where the pilot is on top of the food chain. It required CRM-type training to "deprogram" some of those authoritarian tendencies and play nicely.
I read the NYT article that was a "source" of that statement, but I found nothing about hiring Western pilots to break that culture. They brought in a former Western airline executive who led a rewrite of the training curriculum, but there was nothing on their about some mass influx of Western pilots. Anecdotally, I have yet to see a non-Korean pilot on a Korean Air flight. If anything, according to this article and discussion, non-Western pilots make up just 15% of their aircrews and many are used on a more temporary basis.
I assume from your name that you are Japanese. Can you comment on the deference / respect for the elder in Japanese culture compared with Korea (ISTM right up there) and why we haven't heard about Japanese airline accidents resulting from the same?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
. . . take time off from his busy propaganda attack campaign against the Occupy movement --- what a complete a total jackhole that fraudster is!
A GREAT landing is one after which you can use the plane again.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
There's no moral argument you can make that places the life of an undeveloped fetus over the life and interests of its mother. You're likely to be objectively correct on all other points.
If they have a big problem with copilots and navigators having too much respect for authority, I have three kids who'd be perfect for them...
This kind of Gladwellian thought experiment is interesting and thought-provoking. Maybe some cultural proscription against questioning one's elders/superiors had at least a partial influence on how this crash played out. Maybe we can take that as a lesson about cockpit communication. Or communication in general.
The point I'd like to make is that we'll never know if that was the cause or not. It's most likely a lot more complicated than that.
IIRC, it was the other way around. The pilot that was in control is the older of the 2 and has over 10,000 hours of flight time, just not in the 777. In the 777 he has only about 43 hours flight time "in type". The younger pilot, however, has more flight time in the 777 and was there to familiarise the older pilot with the aircraft and be present while he increased his flight time. Therefore the respect vs elder angle could definitely be valid.
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. - Albert Einstein
Exactly. Some years ago a PBS documentary about airplane crashes where FO (co-pilot) sensed something is out of place but too intimidated to challenge the Captain. Decades ago, CRM was very dependent on the Captain's ego. Some like to take the co-pilot under their tutelage and train them to eventually be pilot-in-command. Others said, "get out of my way, do something useful, go make some coffee." Though when we get to jets, CRM was not that extreme but it was still subtle. Couple examples was a plane that ran out of gas (I think it was early 90s) because they had an inflight emergency and captain was busy gathering info and making decisions. Co-pilot observes fuel getting lower and lower but hesitated to interrupt the captain. Pilot-In-Command should provide "opening" to accept conflicting information. Another example this documentary had was a captain saying one incident where flight plan was cruise altitude of 32K, when after takeoff and switching to Departure, Departure said to level off at 27K. However this captain had 32K (FL 320) affixed in his mind, that while rapidly climbing through 25K the FO said, "weren't we going to 27?" Captain immediately realized his error and backed off on the throttle, "OMG, I could have had a altitude bust or worse."
mfwright@batnet.com
You assume wrong. The user name is pure random gibberish. Ergo, I have no idea.
Ezekiel 23:20
Well, on the page someone linked earlier:
http://www.airdisaster.com/statistics/
All Nippon has the single best incident rate of any airline. So that might be why. (Certainly would tend to blow another hole in the article's theory, though.)
The Slate article is apologetic bullshit. A large and modern aircraft crashed due to gross incompetence of the pilots, killing 2 people. How the hell is that not an "air disaster".
Let's nip this storyline in the bud.
Yeah, we wouldn't want a company to have bad PR, and we wouldn't want to hurt some culture's feelings. it is better to fly unsafe planes and kill passengers.
Whatever happened on final approach into SFO, I highly doubt that it was anything related to the culture of Korean air safety in 2013.
Oh, oh, "you doubt", well that certainly takes precedence over flight recorder evidence.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
For other than small planes, you get type rated (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating [wikipedia.org]) by someone who's more experienced in that type of aircraft.
How does that work with a new plane that nobody's type rated for yet (eg. the Airbus A380 was only relatively recently released)?
Oh sorry, I didn't mean to offend your impression that Americans don't generally drink to excess. And that there's a difference between working in some corporate office and flying a plane. Besides, it was an offhand response to a stupid post about excessive deference causing accidents, which cited Malcom "I am a twit" Gladwell, of all people, as a source.
The idea that respect for your elders should be given priority even when doing so results in the death of hundreds of people (some of whom may actually be older Any cultural expectations which cause unnecessary death and suffering are fundamentally flawed and should be eliminated. People should be smart enough to question things, not just blindly follow what they've been taught ESPECIALLY when doing so is likely to be detrimental or cause death. I believe it's true. Glenn Doman
Here is a more knowledgeable article about this crash written by an airline pilot. Korean airlines may have had some of those problems years back, but no longer.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
The manufacturer provides the training. Mostly in simulators.
...richie - It is a good day to code.