Korean Air had an unusual and striking track record: 5 crashes in under 5 years. Most planes don’t crash that often. After being put on watch by the aviation industry, Korean Air radically transformed their safety record. Gladwell seeks to understand this airline as a kind of outlier. Why the unusual track record?
Gladwell describes how typical airplane crashes are a slippery slope of events. Most of the time, one small error after another builds up leading to disaster, rather than the assumption that one, fiery event is the cause.
Typically, consecutive flight errors are at the root of a disaster in the air, such as: Weather, pilot fatigue, and pilot and co-pilot having little experience flying together.
Flight decks are complicated mechanisms and are intended for 2 people to maneuver together, testing and checking each other’s decisions. Gladwell says, “The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication” (184).
Cultural factors at play in communication between pilots and control towers can have disastrous consequences. Gladwell discusses Colombian airline Avianca, flight 052, which crashed in January 1990.
In this situation 2 major errors in communication occurred:
- The co-pilot wasn’t adamant enough in his communications with the control tower about the rapidly decreasing fuel levels on the aircraft as they waited for clearance to land in New York.
- The co-pilot was worried the control tower was angry at him. He displays a Columbian deference to the brash communication style of New Yorkers.
In the Korean Air crash, the co-pilot’s deference to the pilot in command, a cultural gesture of respect for those in authority, prevented action that could have saved the plane. The pilot was fatigued and not making clear decisions. The co-pilot caught the errors, but was too polite in his communication to make an impact. He was using what Gladwell calls “mitigated speech.”
Gladwell discusses how some cultures have a higher tolerance for ambiguity in speech communication than others. This tolerance leads to unclear and ineffective co-piloting in the air. Not surprisingly, those with this cultural communication style coincide with those airlines with the highest crash records.
David Greenberg, from Delta Airlines, is brought in by Korean Air to reeducate pilots on assertive cockpit communication.
He does the following to transform their approach:
- Improves their language skills: all pilots learn English, since it is the standard language used by control towers.
- Engages them in role playing to see the importance of collaboration in the cockpit.
Greenberg worked respectfully with Korean cultural legacies but re-framed them for the purpose of airplane safety: “He offered them an opportunity to transform their relationship to their work” (219).
