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Comment by richtr | Hacker News Reader

While we are looking at reasons why this crash happened it may be worthwhile to consider Malcolm Gladwell's suggestion in his book 'Outliers' that Korean cultural legacy, where the High Power Distance ratio between bosses (the pilot) and their underlings (such as the co-pilot) were responsible for a series of Korean Air crashes in the 1990s.

"In addition to weather and pilot fatigue, he blames those crashes on crew members whose cultural legacy made them too deferential to communicate clearly that the plane was about to crash"

http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2008/12/04/malcolm-gladwell-...

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It may be worthwhile to read a commercial pilots comments after reading Outliers: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety

(A more reasonable explanation that would have been uncovered with basic research is that foreign airline captains have less pilotmim command time.)

It's never worthwhile to spend much time pondering any of Malcom Gladwell's pseudo-scientific drivel.

Asian and Middle-eastern airlines have a huge number of expat pilots.

Let's please let race and culture be speculations of last resort.

Absolutely right. I was bringing to the attention of the HN community a series of Korean airline crashes that occurred in the 1990s that can be directly attributed to this factor [1].

For the record, there are a number of countries worldwide that exhibit the same restricted cultural legacy. For example, there is also a High Power Distance ratio in a number Latin American and African countries [2]. See, for example, details of the crash of Colombian Avianca Flight 52 [3].

Whether this is a factor _in this particular incident_ is of course for the authorities to decide. Considering the provenance of this airline as being from a high power distance ratio country I felt this information might be relevant or at least of interest to others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_incidents_and_accid...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede's_cultural_dimensions...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52#Cause_and_in...

Korea exports pilots to countries like China (where I live), they don't import them so much anymore.

Taiwanese airlines (China Airlines) had a horrible safety record for a while, largely due to having mainly ex-military pilots from a culture of covering up deficiencies and hiding problems to save social standing and such. I would never fly on them as a result (they're probably better now).

OTOH, Evergreen/EVA Air has an awesome safety program and record, and is also Taiwanese. So, it's a cultural issue within specific airlines, not overall national culture. (Similarly, I think it was AirTran and a couple other LCCs in the US which had horrible safety culture, and Alaska has amazing safety culture.)

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