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That was a Malcolm Gladwell theory that has been debunked, particularly here: http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-and-airplane.html http

That was a Malcolm Gladwell theory that has been debunked, particularly here: http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-and-airplane.html http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-... In general I tend to question much of Gladwell's ideas these days seeing how many of them have been demonstrated to be wrong.

radicaldreamer 5y ago
Aw man, this is a real bummer. I thought I'd weaned myself off of Gladwell, but his fabulism is embedded in my memories from way back :( he's so good at it!
- syntaxfree 5y ago
  The real L, as they say on Twitter now, is that we went so far on making scientific knowledge the only valid kind of knowing that fabulists must now come disguised as science (whereas in the past we all knew what Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, von Daniken etc were all about and could enjoy them for what they were).
jahnu 5y ago
People really should be very wary of anything Gladwell says in recent years. The fisking The Bomber Mafia got should be evidence enough.
- jimmySixDOF 5y ago
  I didn't see a rebuttal which substantially affected his argument. Most of it was the typical bandwagoning against his pop-style storytelling method. Very few disputes of fact. If Gladwell is guilty of anything it is to place a finely tuned modernly biased reference frame onto past events that did not/could not exist at the time but do become increasingly visible with the benefit of hind sight in a way that helps readers connect today with lessons from the past. Call that inauthentic if you will, but I think there are valuable insights to be gained and am glad he reaches such a wide audience in spite of the intellectual backlashing.
  - bigDinosaur 5y ago
    Well, the precise frustration people have with Gladwell (and his fans) is precisely this attitude. A very relaxed attitude towards rigorous evidence. I stopped paying a single bit of attention to him after the 10k hours claims, it was just mountains and mountains of poor or misleading evidence. Believe in what he writes if you will, but I'm fairly certain that barely anything he writes is actually actionable.
yongjik 5y ago
Malcolm Gladwell may have overstated his theory, but askakorean is itself a biased source, and IMHO shouldn't be trusted too much. It is a fact that (1) Korean Air had a string of preventable accidents during that time, (2) pilot hierarchy in communication was believed to be a major factor that led to the Guam disaster, and (3) later Korean Air mandated everybody to speak English in the cockpit. How much (3) contributed to the improved safety record is anyone's guess.
- bakashi 5y ago
  The following are direct quotes from the blog post: > 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.
  - yongjik 5y ago
    As I said, the blog makes weak arguments. This wikipedia page in Korean [1] shows seven KAL accidents in 1990s, with three of them causing deaths (one being the crash at Guam). If you went back in time and asked an average Korean "What do you think about KAL's safety records?" most of them would've said "This is unacceptable and something must be done!" Overall, Korea in the 90s was not a nice place, if your goal was staying alive. 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%B3%B5%EC%9D%98_%EC%82%AC%EA%B1%B4_%EB%B0%8F_%EC%82%AC%EA%B3%A0#1990%EB%85%84%EB%8C%80_3 https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EB%8C%80%ED%95%9C%ED%95%AD%EA... [2] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR0001.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
CamperBob2 5y ago
Wow, are all Koreans that bad at arguing? (/s) How do you even begin to compare a solitary sport like golf to the team effort involved in flying a passenger jet? 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.
letitbeirie 5y ago
It's not just Korean pilots though, deference to a KLM captain in the wrong was a critical link in the chain of events that led to the Tenerife disaster.
- mbubb 5y ago
  that is a very memorable incident - not least for the number of lives lost. I am not sure if it was deference as much as reverting to a native speech pattern in a critical moment. "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. https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/ https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/
TedShiller 5y ago
Malcolm Gladwell proved that he can make things look logical in hindsight, without the ability to have foresight. Which makes his conclusions entirely unimpressive. I can tell you in very nice sounding, complex, and intelligent ways what yesterday's lotto numbers were, by the way.
aunty_helen 5y ago
I think you should forward this on to the training departments of all major aerospace manufacturers. 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
TedShiller 5y ago
What Malcolm Gladwell is good at is telling you yesterday's lotto numbers in a way that sounds very sophisticated and intelligent.

radicaldreamer 5y ago

Aw man, this is a real bummer. I thought I'd weaned myself off of Gladwell, but his fabulism is embedded in my memories from way back :( he's so good at it!

syntaxfree 5y ago
The real L, as they say on Twitter now, is that we went so far on making scientific knowledge the only valid kind of knowing that fabulists must now come disguised as science (whereas in the past we all knew what Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, von Daniken etc were all about and could enjoy them for what they were).

jahnu 5y ago

People really should be very wary of anything Gladwell says in recent years. The fisking The Bomber Mafia got should be evidence enough.

jimmySixDOF 5y ago
I didn't see a rebuttal which substantially affected his argument. Most of it was the typical bandwagoning against his pop-style storytelling method. Very few disputes of fact. If Gladwell is guilty of anything it is to place a finely tuned modernly biased reference frame onto past events that did not/could not exist at the time but do become increasingly visible with the benefit of hind sight in a way that helps readers connect today with lessons from the past. Call that inauthentic if you will, but I think there are valuable insights to be gained and am glad he reaches such a wide audience in spite of the intellectual backlashing.
- bigDinosaur 5y ago
  Well, the precise frustration people have with Gladwell (and his fans) is precisely this attitude. A very relaxed attitude towards rigorous evidence. I stopped paying a single bit of attention to him after the 10k hours claims, it was just mountains and mountains of poor or misleading evidence. Believe in what he writes if you will, but I'm fairly certain that barely anything he writes is actually actionable.

yongjik 5y ago

Malcolm Gladwell may have overstated his theory, but askakorean is itself a biased source, and IMHO shouldn't be trusted too much. It is a fact that (1) Korean Air had a string of preventable accidents during that time, (2) pilot hierarchy in communication was believed to be a major factor that led to the Guam disaster, and (3) later Korean Air mandated everybody to speak English in the cockpit. How much (3) contributed to the improved safety record is anyone's guess.

bakashi 5y ago
The following are direct quotes from the blog post: > 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.
- yongjik 5y ago
  As I said, the blog makes weak arguments. This wikipedia page in Korean [1] shows seven KAL accidents in 1990s, with three of them causing deaths (one being the crash at Guam). If you went back in time and asked an average Korean "What do you think about KAL's safety records?" most of them would've said "This is unacceptable and something must be done!" Overall, Korea in the 90s was not a nice place, if your goal was staying alive. 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%B3%B5%EC%9D%98_%EC%82%AC%EA%B1%B4_%EB%B0%8F_%EC%82%AC%EA%B3%A0#1990%EB%85%84%EB%8C%80_3 https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EB%8C%80%ED%95%9C%ED%95%AD%EA... [2] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR0001.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...

CamperBob2 5y ago

Wow, are all Koreans that bad at arguing? (/s) How do you even begin to compare a solitary sport like golf to the team effort involved in flying a passenger jet? 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.

letitbeirie 5y ago

It's not just Korean pilots though, deference to a KLM captain in the wrong was a critical link in the chain of events that led to the Tenerife disaster.

mbubb 5y ago
that is a very memorable incident - not least for the number of lives lost. I am not sure if it was deference as much as reverting to a native speech pattern in a critical moment. "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. https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/ https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/

TedShiller 5y ago

Malcolm Gladwell proved that he can make things look logical in hindsight, without the ability to have foresight. Which makes his conclusions entirely unimpressive. I can tell you in very nice sounding, complex, and intelligent ways what yesterday's lotto numbers were, by the way.

aunty_helen 5y ago

I think you should forward this on to the training departments of all major aerospace manufacturers. 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

TedShiller 5y ago

What Malcolm Gladwell is good at is telling you yesterday's lotto numbers in a way that sounds very sophisticated and intelligent.