A Colombian airline crashed in New York after running out of fuel due to similar deference to air traffic control.
In general I tend to question much of Gladwell's ideas these days seeing how many of them have been demonstrated to be wrong.
How much (3) contributed to the improved safety record is anyone's guess.
> So, out of the seven KAL crashes that happened in the 20 year span between 1978 and 1997, three were a result of a military or paramilitary attack. Those three crashes clearly have little to do with pilot skills. […] that Gladwell would use incidents of terrorist attacks to pad the stats is darn near offensive. It is as if New York is being described as extra-dangerous in the early 2000s by including the number of deaths from the 9/11 attacks. > Take a look at p. 204 of the report, which shows the point at which the pilots initiate their landing check sequence, thinking that they must be near the airport. For the next five pages--which ends with the moment of the crash--the pilots are communicating almost entirely in English. […] Gladwell explains that the new COO of Korean Air, David Greenberg (a former Delta Air Lines executive,) solved all the difficulties caused by the ambiguous Korean language by requiring the pilots to speak only in English. Gladwell writes: "In English, [the pilots] would be free of the sharply defined gradients of Korean hierarchy . . . Instead, the pilots could participate in a culture and language with a very different legacy." But Gladwell never reveals that Korean Air pilots were already speaking mostly in English, although that fact was absolutely plain from the transcript.
Also, even the blog acknowledges that among the three incidents attributed to military/terrorist attacks, two of them started with pilot errors. KAL 902 was flying from Paris to Anchorage, but somehow made an almost 180 degree turn over the arctic, and ended up in Soviet airspace. It was shot at and forced to land on a lake: two died. The much more tragic KAL 007 also made a similar mistake, and was shot down, killing everyone.
I don't know about aviation, but among all the things a pilot should never do in the 70s-80s, I'd assume "fly into Soviet airspace unannounced" was pretty high in the list.
Also, if you look at the transcript of the Guam crash [2], it's hard to claim that pilots were communicating in 90% English. There's a lot of English, but they are technical words, like when you read off a checklist or verify readings. Everything that is unusual or requires a decision is spoken in Korean, like [all in Korean]:
> check the glide slope if working?
> why is it working?
> glide slope is incorrect
> since today's glide slope condition is not good, we need to maintain one thousand four hundred forty.
> not in sight
> let's make a missed approach [six seconds before impact]
From the transcript, it's clear that there was no way one could have said something like "The weather is too bad, let's go around" in English. Anything other than completely mechanical steps were decided in Korean.
Now, of course, that doesn't mean that Korean is inferior for communication or the culture is inherently flawed or whatever. But it seems reasonable to say that KAL had a company-wide culture of putting schedule over safety, and the hierarchy over pilots contributed to it. Because they were all Korean, the communication problem itself manifested in the Korean language.
Was it a stupid decision to ban Korean in the cockpit? Maybe, but if something is stupid and it works, then it's not stupid.
[1] https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EB%8C%80%ED%95%9C%ED%95%AD%EA...
[2] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
I'd really like to see # of hours of CRM training (and total training!) company wide vs. fatal accidents, and dig in even deeper to see if the training was even any good. (You could give every pilot 10 hours of bad training, and it wouldn't help the accident rate.)
Anyway, I'm sure someone has these numbers. My guess is that much more work was done than saying "just speak English" and the problem was magically fixed.
It's more like you're Guido van Rossum watching Jeff Dean give a live demo, and the presentation is proceeding in a way that is going to kill you, Dean, and 200 random people from the audience.
Skipping a step here and there is rarely ever going to seem like it'll end in deaths of your and everyone else in the flight.
"We've flown this same route 2000 times before and never had an issue. My Captain is as old as my father and has been flying all his life. The weather is great, we're a little late, and he's probably right, skipping this pre-flight checklist this time isn't going to do any harm."
> skipping this pre-flight checklist
Does this happen? My only knowledge about piloting is checklists are considered sacrosanct. Wouldn't skipping a checklist raise a red-flag?
I was responding to a comment where it was implied that the decision was a definite life-and-death decision.
Believe in what he writes if you will, but I'm fairly certain that barely anything he writes is actually actionable.
I can tell you in very nice sounding, complex, and intelligent ways what yesterday's lotto numbers were, by the way.
"We are at takeoff" is what the pilot said and a native English speaker would have said something more like "We are taking off". A subtle difference - I grok what he was saying after the fact but in the moment the other's understanding was something like 'the KLM plane is currently at the starting point for takeoff'.
All these are just guesses on my part - I think of this incident often, particularly in terms of clarity and 'closed loop' comms under stress.
The influence of cultural imbalances on aviation safety is not a subject for debate, and hasn't been since the Tenerife disaster in which a junior officer hesitated to argue with a respected senior pilot. This blogger may be well-intentioned but they haven't bothered to do their homework. Point goes to Gladwell on this one, as flawed as his conclusions have been in other areas.
I can distinctly remember being taught this during a human factors mandatory training during my time at one of the 3 engine manufacturers.
I’m sure they would like to update their FAA approved training schedules based on the new information from askakorean.blogspot.com
I learned about a number of air disasters and PanAm/KLM crash[1] in Tenerife 1977 really stuck with me. In the transcript a Dutch pilot says something like "We are now at take off" when he was indicating that the plane was in the process of taking off. (an idiomatic way of expression)
There was already much stress on the situation as an incident at another airport caused massive traffic rearrangement across Europe. Under stress we revert to native ways of expression. I tried to keep this incident in the back of my mind throughout the project, and since...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
edit - include the transcrpt: https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/
It reminds me of the Japanese invasion of Chosun dynasty, how the rigid military/confucian structure made communication impossible and largely allowed unopposed landings by Hideyoshi's army.
Hmm I don't exactly know which way the terms were exported, but many people blame modern Korea's ageism on colonial Japan (at least partially), where the Japanese Empire tried to run itself as grandiose military barracks and trained everyone to be subject to the social hierarchy. Rigid hierarchy and hazing was a huge problem in the Imperial Japanese military.
The Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) had numerous issues but actually ageism wasn't as prevalent. Confucian scholars regularly made friends with each other over five or ten years of age difference. (You may think "so what?" but that pretty much never happens among students in modern Korea.)
Also, one reason that Joseon allowed Japanese landing at the start of the invasion of 1592 was that that division of the navy was led by Won Gyun, one of the worst admirals in Korea's history. Shortly after the war began he ordered his own fleet burned and ran away.
(Later, the legendary Yi Sunshin was imprisoned after being framed by Japanese espionage, and Won became the commander again. He then sailed the whole Korean fleet into a death trap at the battle of Chilcheonnyang, losing almost the entire fleet. Won ran away and likely died. We don't know exactly what happened to him.)
Chosun was rife with corruption, rigid social hierarchy except through state examinations one could join the ranks based on skill and stability. It was very stable because of the oppressive social hierarchy based on neo-confucian ideals. The royalty were corrupt and immoral (with the exception of Sejong who created the Korean alphabet) and the last Chosun queen herself spent most of the state's treasury on luxury goods.
Not many missed the Chosun dynasty, well apart from North Korea which introduced many of its traditions (punishing 3 family generations of state designated criminals is from this era), ageism, caste, oppression of women, sexual minorities and male chauvinism. In fact Japan's colonialism brought more equality and ended caste system with meritocracy. Any modern claims of "collaborators" or such are moot, because it was a failed monarchy state and Korea simply was without any political direction.
Korea's success is economic success is largely owed to the Japan (the first capital investments and transfer of technology was from Japan to normalize relations) and its imperial economic system of zaibatsu (chaebol) and the 5-year economic plan that the strongman Park Chung Hee used was straight out of Manchukuo.
anyways just rambling on here as I eat pistachios about my understanding of korean history as an outsider on a friday evening.
y'all have a good weekend.
It is. you are using a special anecdotal case in a family situation (that same person would use honorifics towards their friends who are much older) to negate the rest of Korean society that uses one's age to decide who is above and below you, and the necessary honorifics. DK effect is quite laughable to see from a non-Korean.
I invite you to address your professor or sunbae or the elderly without honorifics and see their reaction. You wouldn't be able to use your race card very long.
I have seen low-rank white dudes get status upgrades in other Asian countries for a variety of reasons. One architect told me how he was hanging with high status Indonesians, and how he could name-drop NZ politicians (for example, the minister of finance) because our culture means low-rank citizens can personally know people in high-rank positions. Perhaps I can manipulate the Korean status game in my favour because my background is somewhat unmeasurable.
It might have worked in the 60s or in South East Asia but certainly will not work anymore in East Asia, especially in a hyper connected world. In fact many foreigners who achieved celebrity status by lying were quickly cancelled.
By large, a non-asian person in East Asia is largely limited to an exotic animal at the zoo. Somewhat of a novelty for kids and adults to point and laugh "wow! we have foreigners in our country speaking our language".
You would see the same response towards a monkey suddenly speaking Korean or Japanese.
I'm many cases this would apply even if you are Korean but grew up outside the hierarchy (i.e. grew up in the US)
You'd have some status as a us citizen as a white person, but it's complicated and a double edged sword
Though I do agree that good airmanship would have been to tell ATC no and land the plane. A pilot may do that if lives are at risk.
That said I don't have any reason to think it actually does and you didn't supply one either. Are air traffic controllers even normally from the area where they work? Don't they get assigned?
New York controllers were more abrasive than they were used to and they had trouble speaking up. The controllers also didn’t communicate well amongst themselves and the pilots didn’t know their request for a sooner landing to due low fuel was not passed on.
Ultimately, the problem was the pilot’s failure to follow procedures. With the controllers being disorganized either due to lack of procedure or failure to follow it. Either of them could have prevented it.
Note: It is not sufficient to blame the pilots and move on. People make mistakes. Both sides need to be improved, because single points of failure kill people.
They then failed to tell passengers to brace before they crashed, which is thought to have contributed to injuries and even deaths.
The whole point is creating a defense in depth so one factor can’t take down a plane.
It is always the pilot’s prerogative to overrule ATC (if there’s a legitimate reason) and/or declare an emergency. And I assure you NY ATC would take it seriously if you do. They just don’t have time to dance around.
They are highly specialized on local facilities, weather, traffic flows, etc. The New York Metro area is one, if not the, most complicated airspace’s to control in the world. 4 major international airports (and tons of smaller airports/heliports) surrounding dense major cities with complicated weather, noise abatement procedures, and high congestion.
There are dozens of air traffic controllers of all different seats (supervisors, arrivals, ground, towers, helicopters) in the region. It’s a lot of coordinate.
This video gives a nice 3 minute overview: https://www.faa.gov/tv/?mediaId=1042
JFK, LGA, EWR, what’s the fourth one?
It doesn't have US customs and border protection facilities.
In the rest of the country that I've flown in, the controllers seem to be aiming for the voice of bored Apollo mission controllers.
Given the amazing volume they handle I’ve always found them nothing but crisp and professional.
If you’re also basing your opinion on those audio clips rather than actually asking for clearances or navigating the exclusions I think you might also have the wrong impression.
The US Army's ATC units had the motto of "Safe, Orderly, & Expeditious."