Asiana Crash and Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers Chapter Seven: The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes

[UPDATE 7/12/13:  Be sure to also read Ask A Korean's critique of Gladwell's chapter on plane crashes, which a commenter alerted me to.]

When I heard about the Asiana crash in San Francisco today I had three thoughts:

1. As someone who flies more frequently than I like, and not long ago to and from San Francisco, my sympathy goes to the families of people who died in the crash and my very best wishes go to those who were injured. 
2. We flew from Seoul to Anchorage returning from China probably in the 1990's. I know we've flown that route on Korean and on Asiana, so I'm not sure which airline this was on. On our seats was an English language newspaper, maybe the International Herald Tribune with an article about Asiana's (or Korea's) airline travel partners dropping the airline because of safety issues.  Not something that made for a relaxing flight.
3. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers has a chapter on how culture impacts cockpit communications, with a number of pages dedicated to Korean Airlines.  That's what I want to focus on now.  You can read the chapter online beginning here.

There are three preconditions that lead to plane crashes, he tells us:

• a minor technical problem
• bad weather
• tired pilot

Gladwell then focuses on pilot behavior citing two pyschological/anthropological models:

• mitigated speech
• "Hofstede's Dimensions"

 Mitigated Speech

". . . 'mitigated speech,' . . . refers to any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we're being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed, or when we're being deferential to authority. If you want your boss to do you a favor, you don't say, "I'll need this by Monday." You mitigate.

You say, "Don't bother, if it's too much trouble, but if you have a chance to look at this over the weekend, that would be wonderful." In a situation like that, mitigation is entirely appropriate. In other situations, however—like a cockpit on a stormy night—it's a problem.
The linguists Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu once gave the following hypothetical scenario to a group of captains and first officers and asked them how they would respond:
You notice on the weather radar an area of heavy precipitation 25 miles ahead. [The pilot] is maintaining his present course at Mach .73, even though embedded thunder storms have been reported in your area and you encounter moderate turbulence. You want to ensure that your aircraft will not penetrate this area.
Question: what do you say to the pilot?
In Fischer's and Orasanu's minds, there were at least six ways to try to persuade the pilot to change course and avoid the bad weather, each with a different level of mitigation.
Command: "Turn thirty degrees right." That's the most direct and explicit way of making a point imaginable. It's zero mitigation.
Crew Obligation Statement: "I think we need to deviate right about now." Notice the use of "we" and the fact that the request is now much less specific. That's a little softer.
Crew Suggestion: "Let's go around the weather." Implicit in that statement is "we're in this together."
Query: "Which direction would you like to deviate?" That's even softer than a crew suggestion, because the speaker is conceding that he's not in charge.
Preference: "I think it would be wise to turn left or right."
Hint: "That return at twenty-five miles looks mean."
This is the most mitigated statement of all. Fischer and Orasanu found that captains overwhelmingly said they would issue a command in that situation: "Turn thirty degrees right." They were talking to a subordinate. They had no fear of being blunt. The first officers, on the other hand, were talking to their boss, and so they overwhelmingly chose the most mitigated alternative. They hinted.
It's hard to read Fischer and Orasanu's study and not be just a little bit alarmed, because a hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse. In the 1982 Air Florida crash outside Washington, DC, the first officer tried three times to tell the captain that the plane had a dangerous amount of ice on its wings. But listen to how he says it. It's all hints:
FIRST OFFICER:
Look how the ice is just hanging on his, ah, back, back there, see that?
Then:
FIRST OFFICER:
See all those icicles on the back there and everything?
And then:
FIRST OFFICER:
Boy, this is a, this is a losing battle here on trying to de-ice those things, it [gives] you a false feeling of security, that's all that does.
Finally, as they get clearance for takeoff, the first officer upgrades two notches to a crew suggestion:
FIRST OFFICER:
Let's check those [wing] tops again, since we've been setting here awhile.
CAPTAIN:
I think we get to go here in a minute.
The last thing the first officer says to the captain, just before the plane plunges into the Potomac River, is not a hint, a suggestion, or a command. It's a simple statement of fact—and this time the captain agrees with him.
FIRST OFFICER:
Larry, we're going down, Larry.
CAPTAIN:
I know it.

Mitigation explains one of the great anomalies of plane crashes. In commercial airlines, captains and first officers split the flying duties equally. But historically, crashes have been far more likely to happen when the captain is in the "flying seat." At first that seems to make no sense, since the captain is almost always the pilot with the most experience. But think about the Air Florida crash. If the first officer had been the captain, would he have hinted three times? No, he would have commanded—and the plane wouldn't have crashed. Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn't going to be afraid to speak up."  (pp. 60-61)

Hofstede's Dimensions

Hofstede's three dimension across cultures are:

• individualism - collectivism scale
• uncertainty avoidance
• power distance index

For looking at cockpit conversations like the one above, Gladwell tells us the power distance index is the most important.

"Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority. To measure it, Hofstede asked questions like "How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?" To what extent do the "less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally?" How much are older people respected and feared? Are power holders entitled to special privileges?
"In low-power distance index countries," Hofstede wrote in his classic text Culture's Consequences:

power is something of which power holders are almost ashamed and they will try to underplay. I once heard a Swedish (low PDI) university official state that in order to exercise power he tried not to look powerful. Leaders may enhance their informal status by renouncing formal symbols. In (low PDI) Austria, Prime Minister Bruno Kreisky was known to sometimes take the streetcar to work. In 1974, I actually saw the Dutch (low PDI) prime minister, Joop den Uyl, on vacation with his motor home at a camping site in Portugal. Such behavior of the powerful would be very unlikely in high-PDI Belgium or France." 25

You can imagine the effect that Hofstede's findings had on people in the aviation industry. What was their great battle on mitigated speech and teamwork all about, after all? It was an attempt to reduce power distance in the cockpit. Hofstede's question about power distance."How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?".was the very question aviation experts were asking first officers in their dealings with captains. And Hofstede's work suggested something that had not occurred to anyone in the aviation world: that the task of convincing first officers to assert themselves was going to depend an awful lot on their culture's power distance rating.

The power distance in Korea is extremely high. More from Outliers:

The Korean linguist Ho-min Sohn writes:

At a dinner table, a lower-ranking person must wait until a higher-ranking person sits down and starts eating, while the reverse does not hold true; one does not smoke in the presence of a social superior; when drinking with a social superior, the subordinate hides his glass and turns away from the superior;… in greeting a social superior (though not an inferior) a Korean must bow; a Korean must rise when an obvious social superior appears on the scene, and he cannot pass in front of an obvious social superior. All social behavior and actions are conducted in the order of seniority or ranking; as the saying goes, chanmul to wi alay ka issta, there is order even to drinking cold water.

So, when the first officer says, "Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here?" [from a pre crash cockpit tape] we know what he means by that:
Captain. You have committed us to visual approach, with no backup plan, and the weather outside is terrible. You think that we will break out of the clouds in time to see the runway. But what if we don't? It's pitch-black outside and pouring rain and the glide scope is down.
But he can't say that. He hints, and in his mind he's said as much as he can to a superior. The first officer will not mention the weather again.
It is just after that moment that the plane, briefly, breaks out of the clouds, and off in the distance the pilots see lights.
"Is it Guam?" the flight engineer asks. Then, after a pause, he says, "It's Guam, Guam."
The captain chuckles. "Good!"
But it isn't good. It's an illusion. They've come out of the clouds for a moment. But they are still twenty miles from the airport, and there is an enormous amount of bad weather still ahead of them. The flight engineer knows this, because it is his responsibility to track the weather, so now he decides to speak up.
"Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot," he says.
The weather radar has helped us a lot? A second hint from the flight deck. What the engineer means is just what the first officer meant. This isn't a night where you can rely on just your eyes to land the plane. Look at what the weather radar is telling us: there's trouble ahead.
To Western ears, it seems strange that the flight engineer would bring up this subject just once. Western communication has what linguists call a "transmitter orientation", that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. Even in the tragic case of the Air Florida crash, where the first officer never does more than hint about the danger posed by the ice, he still hints four times, phrasing his comments four different ways, in an attempt to make his meaning clear. He may have been constrained by the power distance between himself and the captain, but he was still operating within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker.
But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said. In the engineer's mind, he has said a lot.

[UPDATE 9/29/13:  Ask a Korean adds context to this which challenges Gladwell convincingly.  He notes one co-pilot was older than the pilot and both had graduated from a much more prestigious institution, which counterbalances the status Gladwell mentions.  He also translates the sections of the flight recorder that were in Korean and that would seem to contradict what Gladwell presents.]

Korean Airlines got help.

In 2000, Korean Air finally acted, bringing in an outsider from Delta Air Lines, David Greenberg, to run their flight operations.
Greenberg's first step was something that would make no sense if you did not understand the true roots of Korean Air's problems. He evaluated the English language skills of all of the airline's flight crews. "Some of them were fine and some of them weren't," he remembers. "So we set up a program to assist and improve the proficiency of aviation English." His second step was to bring in a Western firm—a subsidiary of Boeing called Alteon—to take over the company's training and instruction programs. "Alteon conducted their training in English," Greenberg says. "They didn't speak Korean." Greenberg's rule was simple. The new language of Korean Air was English, and if you wanted to remain a pilot at the company, you had to be fluent in that language. "This was not a purge," he says. "Everyone had the same opportunity, and those who found the language issue challenging were allowed to go out and study on their own nickel. But language was the filter. I can't recall that anyone was fired for flying proficiency shortcomings."
Greenberg's rationale was that English was the language of the aviation world. When the pilots sat in the cockpit and worked their way through the written checklists that flight crews follow on every significant point of procedure, those checklists were in English. When they talked to Air Traffic Control anywhere in the world, those conversations would be in English. . .

Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles when they sat in the cockpit, and language was the key to that transformation. In English, they would be free of the sharply denned gradients of Korean hierarchy: formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain. Instead, the pilots could participate in a culture and language with a very different legacy. (p. 68)

And the training eventually got Korean Airlines back into the top ranks of international air carriers.  However, This was a while back and it wasn't at Asiana.  I'm sure that anyone who works in Airline safety has read this chapter and is thinking about this.  Or, it could be something totally different.

This also reminds us of the importance of anthropology.  It helps us understand cross-cultural differences  - differences that make people from one culture more useful in some situations and from other cultures in other situations. (A little power deference might be helpful in some parts of the US politics these days.)

You can read Gladwell's chapter "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes" here. 

[UPDATE Sept. 29:   The Ask A Korean post gives context which refutes Gladwell's narative about the the Korean airline pilots.  If you read this, I strongly recommend you read  Ask A Korean's critique of Gladwell's chapter  as well.  He convincingly punctures much of what Gladwell says.

I've included these updates today because many people are reading this post and going on to the original Gladwell chapter, but only a few are following the Ask a Korean link which credibly challenges Gladwell.  If you've gotten this far, you owe your world view a chance to see another view of this.]

Wag It, Then Go Kaleidoscopic

Caught this sticker on the back of a car at the Little Su hike parking lot.  I want one of these.  It says it all. 


Not only that, but this post offers you another treat.  Trust me - go to this link and let your inner child play a little.  (Or let your outer child play if you have one around.) 

Instead Of Writing A Book, Write Letters And Save The Post Office

According to writer Joseph Epstein*, “81 percent of Americans feel that they have a book in them — and should write it.” That’s approximately 200 million people who aspire to authorship.

The Publisher Perspective piece goes on to say most won't.  And given the publishing business can't.

The US Post Office announced the other day that they want to stop Saturday delivery.  I suspect that probably will be ok, unless that is just a step toward cutting off the rest of the week, one at a time.  

So, I'm calling out to the 200 million would be writers to instead write letters.   If each would be writer wrote and sent two letters, at the current rate for a one ounce letter, it would raise $180 million for the post office.  If they wrote two letters a week for a year, it would raise almost $10 billion a year for the post office. 

And if one out of ten letters they wrote were answered, that would raise another $1 billion. 

These could be personal letters to friends and relatives.  Or they could be bits and pieces of their book.  They could send out their book in serial form.  They could make copies of each, sign them all individually, and send them out to five or ten people each time.  Maybe they could get subscribers.

The post office still has beautiful stamps.  We just got a set of the Earthscape stamps above. 

Even if you don't aspire to write a book, you can write some letters to people you care about.  I promise you they will pay more attention to it than to your email.  And they'll still have it in five years. 

I think about the letters I have in boxes downstairs.  Letters from my grandparents written before I was born.  Some are to my father who had made it safe to the US as they were trying to get visas to escape Nazi Germany.  They never got the visas.  They never got out.  I never met them.  But I do have letters they wrote.  There are some from my grandmother written to her sister in the US around 1910.  These are one of the only ways I can directly connect with my grandparents - the words they wrote give me a hint of who they were.  The paper and ink give me a way to touch something they touched. 

Perhaps that's why I'm taking this grandfathering stuff so seriously.  I have no real confidence that this blog will survive for my granddaughter to read it in digital form.  But for the time being, I'm here in real life for her.  

How many of your emails will your grandchildren read?  How many are worth reading?  But pieces of paper with your words on them take more effort and you'll probably say something more significant.  And one of the grandchildren will find them one day and connect to you in a totally new way. 

So write to keep the post office, letters, stamps, and your history alive. 


*I didn't know who Joseph Epstein was, so before posting this I decided to check.  His Wikipedia page talks about a 1970 article he wrote that

"has been identified as a significant turning point in the gay rights movement of the early 1970s^"

And not in a good way.  But no one should be held to everything they wrote 45 years ago, though he's a contributing editor for the Daily Standard, which, unfortunately, continues his deleterious view of the subject today.

Shell Has a Plan, But It's Not Available

At Saturday afternoon’s news briefing, Richard Mauer of the Anchorage Daily News asked Shell’s Alaska Operations Manager whether a copy of the Shell’s plan for the recovery of the Kulluk was available.  Sean Churchfield has been using phrases like "the plans are dynamic" and “subject to operational constraints” to explain why a plan wouldn’t be made available. 

I suspect others are thinking what I was thinking:  Do they really have a plan?  Then I remembered that somewhere on my computer I had a copy of their Ice Management Plan.  So I pulled it up.

Shell’s definition of a plan is probably a lot different from the everyday notion of a plan.  Most of us think of a plan as a series of steps that need to be taken to achieve a goal.

But, if the Ice Management Plan (IMP) is what Shell means by a plan, then their concept is not quite what most of us think of as a plan.  Here's one of the more concrete parts of that plan:


Shell Ice Management Plan Roles and Responsibilities Charts

This is only part of the IMP, but it was the part that actually said something somewhat concrete.  A lot of it is just description of their vessels and their 'philosophy' and such things that use up space but don't really give you anything you can get hold of or could hold them to. And there's also the COCP - (Critical Operations and Curtailment Plan).  I did a couple of posts on these plans last September.  So if you want to know what Shell means by a plan here are two posts that go into some detail about them:

As Shell Is About to Drill, What Do We Know About Arctic Sea Ice? 

Started with some UAF videos on Sea Ice Research that took me to Shell's Plans and went into some detail on the COCP and the IMP.

Become An Arctic Oil Expert in Just Ten Minutes a Day

More in depth on the IMP.  




What are some of the reasons they wouldn’t want to show their plan?

There isn’t anything written down that most people would recognize as a plan.
There is a plan but it’s pretty sketchy.
They don’t want to show anything that might expose them to any legal liability.

Any of those and all of those are good possibilities.  I’m guessing the last one plays a significant role in their decision not to share their plans.  Overall, the three news briefings I’ve heard (one on tape, one in person, and one by phone)  might be better described as damage control public relations.  Go out there and deal with the media, because you have to, but say as little as you can get away with.  And what you say should focus on how well the recovery is going.

All this leads me to start pondering what actually does the public need to know?  Let me think about that for a while and get back to you.


This is a crazy new world.  We landed in Seattle.  We ate some lunch and then I reluctantly plugged in the computer and checked the email only to find out there was a Kulluk news conference going on that very minute and I could call in.

So there at the airport I listened in.  Having been in the room Thursday made it a little easier to figure out who was talking. 

We're in LA now visiting my mom. 

Kulluk Unified Command PIO Explains How Stakeholders Can Connect

At Thursday's news briefing, there was discussion about wanting to be sure all stakeholders had access to the Unified Command structure working to safely recover the Kulluk from where it is grounded off Kodiak Island.

So afterward I asked Public Information Officer Amy Midgett how one would do this.  Below is the video in which she answers this.  She also clarified that although people from different agencies may use their agency title - such as PIO - she is THE PIO for the Unified Command. 
Sorry about the camera angle, I was holding it toward Amy, but not looking at the screen as we chatted. That's the State On-Scene Coordinator Steven Russell from the Department of Environmental Conservation to the right at the beginning.



If you are a stakeholder - someone who has an interested in this area - I'd encourage you to try to use their process to connect.  Amy sounds sincere enough in the video.  And if you can't connect, let me know.  But fisherfolk, people working on environmental issues in the area, birders, boaters, anyone with a stake in the area, should at least try their system.

That said, it doesn't look easy.  Despite what Amy said on the video, I can't find any telephone numbers on the website itself.  There was a list of tweets and in one of the tweets, I found this:

• Toll-free community number is 1-866-771-7910

Ask for a liaison and see if it works.

On the "Questions or Comments" page, there is a way to make contact, but you have to give them your first and last name, your email address, and perhaps other information.  (When I signed up for email alerts the other day, 'affiliation' didn't have an asterisk indicating it was required, but when I submitted it, it spit it back because I hadn't filled out affiliation.)

This is a very limited sharing of information to the public.  The public has to give up more information if they want to ask a question.  In comparison, the Alaska Redistricting Website was much more accessible. 

They tell us there are over 500 people working on this operation.  That's a lot more than the Redistricting Board had.  If they wanted better communication, or if they thought it was important, they could have it. 

Airport Parking Attitude Surprise

 This is a slightly edited version of an email I sent to the Anchorage Airport Manager a couple of weeks ago after I got charged $15 for losing my parking ticket.  (People in Chicago might think that is cheap, but the issue wasn't the money.  It was the attitude.)


Dear Airport Manager:

Yesterday I picked my wife up at the airport. I got my parking ticket at about 8:20 pm.  On the way out, when I got to the parking payment kiosk, I couldn't find my ticket. I went back to where I had waited and looked to see if I could find it.  Maybe it had fallen out when  I'd pulled some notes out of my shirt pocket that had the ticket.

But it was not to be found. I understand the policy that says $15 - the max for 24 hours - for a lost ticket. Everyone who loses a ticket would claim they were there for just a short time. But in my case, I had been to Costco before picking up my wife. (I'd gone home and dropped things off and waited at home because the plane was delayed.) I had the receipt in my pocket.  I'd used my credit card, so it had my identity on it and the check out  time: 7:05pm. This clearly showed that I couldn't have been at the airport for more than two hours. (It took at least 15 minutes to go through the transaction at the airport exit and it was 9pm when someone finally came and opened the arm.)

 I understood that the woman in the ticket booth didn't have the authority to waive any part of the fee. But she kindly gave me a receipt after I requested one and she signed  my Costco receipt to show that she had seen it at that time. The next morning I called the Anchorage Airport Parking. I understand that verifying things like this is difficult and may lead to endless requests. But I also know that any organization can make exceptions to their rules.

The woman I first talked to said it couldn't be changed, there could be no refund without a ticket.  I understood she didn't have discretion to change it either. But her supervisor, who I talked to next, repeated this in a condescending way. "It's your responsibility to keep possession of your card," in a tone of voice you use with a naughty child who has repeatedly done something wrong. I can afford the $9 difference between the two hours I would have been charged if the two hours had been accepted as the most I could have been there. My real complaint was the attitude that I got. "We charge $15 if you lose your ticket and if you are irresponsible enough to lose your ticket, that's tough. Even if you can prove you couldn't have been there more than two hours, we don't care. Cause that's our rule and we don't have to be nice to you."

I assumed this was a company with a private contract with the Airport. This is a business that I would not return to if it didn't have a monopoly on a public service I have to use because I live in Anchorage. But I don't have any choice. Any good business that wants to keep customers, treats them with respect and doesn't ignore their polite and reasonable requests. At the very least he could have asked me to send in all the evidence I had. A responsible business with customers that have a choice on where to do business would do that or they would lose their customers.

 The issue here is not the money - I probably would have gotten free parking if I had had my ticket at the kiosk.  The issue is the attitude I got from the supervisor on the phone. All companies can waive the rules if they wish. It would be interesting to know how many lost card payments the airport parking gets in a day and if the company keeps all the revenue from them or shares it with the Airport.

I'd hope that you talk to them about customer service and about reasonable requests for waivers of the policy if someone has readily available evidence of the maximum time they could have been parked. The point of the policy is that anyone can say they were only there a short time. I accept that. And if I didn't happen to have that receipt, I wouldn't be writing this email. I just think this was unreasonable and their response was inappropriate for a company that has a monopoly on a public service.  I know you have much more serious issues to deal with, but I wanted you to know what's going on.

Sincerely,

 SA



OK, I got it out of my system. 

But today I got a call from Republic Parking saying that had $15 for me.  I'd forgotten about it and I almost hung up on them.   And then I remembered.  Whoa!  Are you kidding me? 

Since I'd paid cash - that was the night my credit card was canceled because they didn't have my wife's social security number (that's another story) and the first time it was rejected was at the ticket booth - they were refunding the money in cash which I had to pick up.  My wife was out running errands and called.  I told her about the $15 and she went to pick it up.  When she got home, she said they were incredibly polite. 

My thanks to the Airport Manager for following up on this. 

I do still wonder who gets the penalty money and if that encourages them to be so hard-nosed about lost tickets.  But it's better to keep your ticket safe.  I look at this as totally found money that is waiting to passed on to someone who needs it more than I.