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