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Comment by ronilan | Hacker News Reader

> "The X are very very bright and smart so I was puzzled by their inability to fly an airplane well"

Turns out to be true for most X as long as: 1. The speaker does not belong to group X 2. Speaker has one data point to support said inability.

Humans error. Humans that program machines error. Machines error.

Buckle your seatbelt.

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> Speaker has one data point

If we trust him, the OP is a flight instructor with many years of experience training X. So, your dismissal is completely invalid.

> The speaker does not belong to group X

Clearly, your are subtly accusing the instructor of at least some kind of racial prejudice; otherwise, this point would be completely irrelevant. And that accusation doesn't seem warranted.

I was thinking about prejudice as well here, however this is not a racial culture thing but a corporate culture thing. If an airline improves training and quality assurance pro forma due to a formal threat of being shut down, something is very, very broken. I'm not sure if I'd ever board a KE or OZ airplane again. If the accusations here are true, both should be shut down immediately.

The fact that the instructor may perhaps (or perhaps not) be mistakenly attributing to Korean ethnic-culture certain worrying aspects is completely unimportant. The real cultural problem is that an instructor perceives pressure to pass students he believes should fail. That simple perception, regardless of underlying cause, is a problem that sabotages efforts to improve.

The speaker is consistent with the chapter on plane crashes in Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, which is a nice treatment of the science around this issue and the movement which led to hiring expat trainers in the first place. As the post's author mentions, inflexible thinking and failure to challenge authority was a fairly common theme in airline crashes of "high power-distance" cultures like Korea (and not low power-distance cultures like the US) for a good while, to the point that aviation authorities felt a need to do something about it.

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