Slashdot Mirror
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Bzzt - out of date (see what happens if you blow a whistle on your 'elders and superiors' in the US - or indeed in most western governments).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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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;
Period.
While (as I have been given to understand) both pilots were rated and signed off for this aircraft, the pilot flying (PF) was being instructed by a senior instructor. It is fair to say that he (the instructor) had a responsibility to make sure that the training exercise did not compromise safety. He failed in this.
On the other hand, the PF has, at all times, the responsibility to "fly the airplane". That includes seeing to it that the AC remains above stall speed until there's a runway right underneath the wheels, and that it doesn't fly into things (other aircraft, mountains, the ground, etc.). He failed too.
Either pilot could have, and arguably should have, noticed the deviation from expected airspeed and glide slope, and then taken appropriate action. Neither did. There seems to be more than enough blame to go around.
They say in the future, airliners will no longer have a pilot and a copilot. Instead, there will be just a pilot and a dog. The dog is there to bite the pilot if he tries to mess with any of the controls.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
. . . take time off from his busy propaganda attack campaign against the Occupy movement --- what a complete a total jackhole that fraudster is!
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
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.