FWIW Malcolm Gladwell's business bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success has a chapter devoted to explaining the superior safety record of American major airl

FWIW Malcolm Gladwell's business bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success has a chapter devoted to explaining the superior safety record of American major airlines compared to foreign carriers: "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes". Gladwell comes to the conclusion that foreigners are unsafe because they are ... foreign. They have a strange and defective culture that prevents the first officer (copilot) from speaking up and pointing out problems to the captain. If only everyone were American, the world would be a better and safer place. This article explores an alternative explanation: foreign airlines do comparatively poorly because their first officers have almost no pilot-in-command experience. https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety