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 th

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/...