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The link I posted notes that 3 of the 7 crashes where Gladwell blames "pilot error" were actually caused by being shot down by the Soviets (x2) and being bombed
by jpatokal 13y ago
The link I posted notes that 3 of the 7 crashes where Gladwell blames "pilot error" were actually caused by being shot down by the Soviets (x2) and being bombed by the North Koreans (x1). Which pretty much removes the statistical anomaly of Korean airlines having more accidents.
- lisper 13y agoLook, we all agree that Malcolm Gladwell is an idiot, so the fact that he cites bogus data contributes nothing to the discussion. Happily, we don't need to rely on Gladwell's data. Korean air lines have had so many incidents and accidents that there's a whole wikipedia page about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_incidents_and_accidents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_incidents_and_accide... "Korean Air had many fatal accidents between 1970 and 1999, during which time it wrote off 16 aircraft in serious incidents and accidents with the loss of 700 lives. The last fatal accident, Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509 in December 1999 led to a review of how Korean cultural attitudes had contributed to its poor crash history." So for 30 years, KAL was crashing planes at the rate of about one every other year. The situation did improve after the review, but there was still an unintended off-runway landing in 2007, and of course the SFO crash (which is not mentioned in the article at all -- someone needs to go update it).