4 ms·

The entire premise, re: Great Golf Players, is off. The vast majority of golf players make bad shots most of the time, and, are a function of individual perfor

The entire premise, re: Great Golf Players, is off. The vast majority of golf players make bad shots most of the time, and, are a function of individual performance. Landing a Plane is not like a golf tournament. Every trained and qualified pilot should be expected to safely land the plane. While not a trivial task, and one requiring significant experience and training, it is not so inordinately difficult that only a very few people alive can perform the task. With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them, that the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual. Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a poor safety record with some korean airlines. I completely agree with the OP that it's absolutely premature to be making any conclusions regarding impact of culture on the Asiana airlines crash, but, the nature of the crash, in great weather, suggests that there will be some systemic failure (Training, Over-reliance on Automation, poor maintenance, overly complex modal-auto-throttle) that turns out to be the cause of it.

michaelochurch 13y ago
The vast majority of golf players make bad shots most of the time, and, are a function of individual performance. Sure, but if you took an untrained, unskilled person and had him flying a trans-Pacific jet, you'd see more crashes. This isn't done, for obvious reasons. A terrible golfer who shoots a 173 just annoys people who have to wait behind him. With an unskilled pilot, the stakes are higher and great efforts are made to prevent one from flying a passenger jet. Good golfers, on the other hand, don't make terrible shots most of the time (although horrible shots are more common than plane crashes). Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a poor safety record with some korean airlines. OP's argument is that this isn't specifically a Korean or East Asian problem, and I agree. Most people are-- except when they perceive a life-threatening crisis (and that point of perception may be too late)-- deferential to authority. It's not limited to one culture.
algorias 13y ago
> Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a poor safety record with some korean airlines. identified by whom? with what credibility? The whole point of the article is refuting that hypothesis. You've done nothing but restate that thought, without adding any more weight to it.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  Some citations regarding cockpit culture issues - I recall reading about them before Gladwell's book. Gladwell just put his own (somewhat hyperbolic) twist on them. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/new-standards-mean-korean-air-is-coming-off-many-shun-lists.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/new-standards-mea... Here is an excellent article on the safety issues with Korean Airlines in the 1990s - much of it, btw, conflicting with the OP's description. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB933090613281869060-search.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB933090613281869060-search.ht...
- notahacker 13y ago
  Identified by both the (US) National Transportation Safety board and Korean Air themselves, both of whom have considerably more credibility than Gladwell or Korean bloggers who get their accident stats wrong when trying to put him right (two passengers died on Flight 902, not "nearly half") Here's a article about how bad the situation was in the late 1990s, published nearly a decade before Gladwell got in on the act. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/575544.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/575544.stm It's generally believed that South Korean airlines have addressed a lot of those problems through changes to the organisational culture and better training, but after a crash which initially looks like a significant error by the flight crew, it's not wholly unreasonable to ask if the pattern is re-emerging.
alanctgardner2 13y ago
If you think that's the entire premise, you didn't read much of the article. Keep scrolling, it's a well well reasoned discussion of why Malcolm Gladwell's commentary on previous KA crashes was misinformed and possibly even distorted to prove his point. Gladwell's book was the source of the "Korean culturalism is incompatible with emergencies" myth you cite. > With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year when there are thousands of planes in the air. This has everything to do with individual decision making on the part of the pilots, which will necessarily be faulty occasionally. It's basically just random chance that some planes every year will crash because of pilot error. > the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual. What sounds better in an NTSB report: "the pilot fucked up and flew into the ocean, whoops" or "we recommend adjusting the height of the foo so the pilot can better see it while barring"? Obviously everyone wants actionable outcomes from post-crash investigations, even when they're just trying to explain away a random accident. Y
- gizzlon 13y ago
  Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year 99.9% success would mean ~475 plane crashes during take-off and landing on Heathrow alone each day =)
  - gizzlon 13y ago
    Wait, that can't be correct, can it? :) Was going off this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_a... Edit: Silly me, the stats are by year not by day as I was expecting. Guess it means only ~1.3 crashes at Heathrow each day
  - protothomas 13y ago
    I doubt there are 475000 take-off and landings per day from Heathrow despite how busy it is!
rmah 13y ago
Wow, talk about missing the point.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them, that the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual. That's a weird assertion. Generally, that events are extremely rare outliers in a system is an indicator they are the result of unique special circumstances applicable to that event (of which, the combination of involved individuals would certainly be a plausible candidate for an event where a small group of individuals had a major direct role the way the flight crew does in aircraft operations), rather than systemic problems. This is pretty much the basis of statistical process control. It turns everything on its head to consider that extremely rare outliers in a process are a particular indication of systemic problems rather than special causes.
- msandford 13y ago
  It's systemic because the whole point of procedures and policies is to avoid the failure of any one part of the system. Imagine the power going out at your company's data center and then one of the generators doesn't turn on, and as a result your website goes down and you lose $10k/hour. Would management suggest that the generator is an individual and an outlier and we'll just hope it doesn't happen again? My guess is that a set of policies would go into place such that even if a single generator did fail, the website would not go down. You now have a systemic fix to what was entirely likely a very rare systemic problem. Just because it's rare doesn't mean it's not systemic.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > It's systemic because the whole point of procedures and policies is to avoid the failure of any one part of the system. I can see that point and agree with it. (Well, I'd say the point is to prevent the failure of any one part of the system from producing unacceptable outcomes rather than preventing the failure of any one part of the system, but that's a minor quibble.) I think my more significant disagreement with the original post is more with the description in that post that it is systemic and little to do with the individual. I'll agree that the fact that the system allowed the individual problem to produce a catastrophic undesired outcome is a systemic problem that (provided a reasonable correction is available) ought to be addressed, but that doesn't mean that the problem had little to do with the individual(s) involved, the fact that it is an outlier means that you aren't dealing with the normal behavior of the system, and that if you are going to address this kind of outlier event, you need to understand the contribution of special circumstances (of which, again, the contributing features of the individuals involved are quite likely relevant components) that produce the outlier event. You can't effectively address the systemic issue if you view it as unrelated to the individuals.

michaelochurch 13y ago

The vast majority of golf players make bad shots most of the time, and, are a function of individual performance. Sure, but if you took an untrained, unskilled person and had him flying a trans-Pacific jet, you'd see more crashes. This isn't done, for obvious reasons. A terrible golfer who shoots a 173 just annoys people who have to wait behind him. With an unskilled pilot, the stakes are higher and great efforts are made to prevent one from flying a passenger jet. Good golfers, on the other hand, don't make terrible shots most of the time (although horrible shots are more common than plane crashes). Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a poor safety record with some korean airlines. OP's argument is that this isn't specifically a Korean or East Asian problem, and I agree. Most people are-- except when they perceive a life-threatening crisis (and that point of perception may be too late)-- deferential to authority. It's not limited to one culture.

algorias 13y ago

> Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a poor safety record with some korean airlines. identified by whom? with what credibility? The whole point of the article is refuting that hypothesis. You've done nothing but restate that thought, without adding any more weight to it.

ghshephard 13y ago
Some citations regarding cockpit culture issues - I recall reading about them before Gladwell's book. Gladwell just put his own (somewhat hyperbolic) twist on them. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/new-standards-mean-korean-air-is-coming-off-many-shun-lists.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/new-standards-mea... Here is an excellent article on the safety issues with Korean Airlines in the 1990s - much of it, btw, conflicting with the OP's description. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB933090613281869060-search.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB933090613281869060-search.ht...
notahacker 13y ago
Identified by both the (US) National Transportation Safety board and Korean Air themselves, both of whom have considerably more credibility than Gladwell or Korean bloggers who get their accident stats wrong when trying to put him right (two passengers died on Flight 902, not "nearly half") Here's a article about how bad the situation was in the late 1990s, published nearly a decade before Gladwell got in on the act. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/575544.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/575544.stm It's generally believed that South Korean airlines have addressed a lot of those problems through changes to the organisational culture and better training, but after a crash which initially looks like a significant error by the flight crew, it's not wholly unreasonable to ask if the pattern is re-emerging.

alanctgardner2 13y ago

If you think that's the entire premise, you didn't read much of the article. Keep scrolling, it's a well well reasoned discussion of why Malcolm Gladwell's commentary on previous KA crashes was misinformed and possibly even distorted to prove his point. Gladwell's book was the source of the "Korean culturalism is incompatible with emergencies" myth you cite. > With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year when there are thousands of planes in the air. This has everything to do with individual decision making on the part of the pilots, which will necessarily be faulty occasionally. It's basically just random chance that some planes every year will crash because of pilot error. > the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual. What sounds better in an NTSB report: "the pilot fucked up and flew into the ocean, whoops" or "we recommend adjusting the height of the foo so the pilot can better see it while barring"? Obviously everyone wants actionable outcomes from post-crash investigations, even when they're just trying to explain away a random accident. Y

gizzlon 13y ago
Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year 99.9% success would mean ~475 plane crashes during take-off and landing on Heathrow alone each day =)
- gizzlon 13y ago
  Wait, that can't be correct, can it? :) Was going off this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_a... Edit: Silly me, the stats are by year not by day as I was expecting. Guess it means only ~1.3 crashes at Heathrow each day
- protothomas 13y ago
  I doubt there are 475000 take-off and landings per day from Heathrow despite how busy it is!

rmah 13y ago

Wow, talk about missing the point.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them, that the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual. That's a weird assertion. Generally, that events are extremely rare outliers in a system is an indicator they are the result of unique special circumstances applicable to that event (of which, the combination of involved individuals would certainly be a plausible candidate for an event where a small group of individuals had a major direct role the way the flight crew does in aircraft operations), rather than systemic problems. This is pretty much the basis of statistical process control. It turns everything on its head to consider that extremely rare outliers in a process are a particular indication of systemic problems rather than special causes.

msandford 13y ago
It's systemic because the whole point of procedures and policies is to avoid the failure of any one part of the system. Imagine the power going out at your company's data center and then one of the generators doesn't turn on, and as a result your website goes down and you lose $10k/hour. Would management suggest that the generator is an individual and an outlier and we'll just hope it doesn't happen again? My guess is that a set of policies would go into place such that even if a single generator did fail, the website would not go down. You now have a systemic fix to what was entirely likely a very rare systemic problem. Just because it's rare doesn't mean it's not systemic.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > It's systemic because the whole point of procedures and policies is to avoid the failure of any one part of the system. I can see that point and agree with it. (Well, I'd say the point is to prevent the failure of any one part of the system from producing unacceptable outcomes rather than preventing the failure of any one part of the system, but that's a minor quibble.) I think my more significant disagreement with the original post is more with the description in that post that it is systemic and little to do with the individual. I'll agree that the fact that the system allowed the individual problem to produce a catastrophic undesired outcome is a systemic problem that (provided a reasonable correction is available) ought to be addressed, but that doesn't mean that the problem had little to do with the individual(s) involved, the fact that it is an outlier means that you aren't dealing with the normal behavior of the system, and that if you are going to address this kind of outlier event, you need to understand the contribution of special circumstances (of which, again, the contributing features of the individuals involved are quite likely relevant components) that produce the outlier event. You can't effectively address the systemic issue if you view it as unrelated to the individuals.