You can imagine the effect that Hofstede’s findings had on people in the aviation industry. What was their great battle over 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.
That’s what Ratwatte meant when he said that no American would have been so fatally intimidated by the controllers at Kennedy Airport. America is a classic low–power distance culture. When push comes to shove, Americans fall back on their American-ness, and that American-ness means that the air traffic controller is thought of as an equal. But what country is at the other end of the power distance scale? Colombia.
In the wake of the Avianca crash, the psychologist Robert Helmreich, who has done more than anyone to argue for the role of culture in explaining pilot behavior, wrote a brilliant analysis of the accident in which he argued that you couldn’t understand Klotz’s behavior without taking into account his nationality, that his predicament that day was uniquely the predicament of someone who had a deep and abiding respect for authority. Helmreich wrote:
The high–power distance of Colombians could have created frustration on the part of the first officer because the captain failed to show the kind of clear (if not autocratic) decision making expected in high–power distance cultures. The first and second officers may have been waiting for the captain to make decisions, but still may have been unwilling to pose alternatives.
Klotz sees himself as a subordinate. It’s not his job to solve the crisis. It’s the captain’s—and the captain is exhausted and isn’t saying anything. Then there’s the domineering Kennedy Airport air traffic controllers ordering the planes around. Klotz is trying to tell them he’s in trouble. But he’s using his own cultural language, speaking as a subordinate would to a superior. The controllers, though, aren’t Colombian. They’re low–power distance New Yorkers. They don’t see any hierarchical gap between themselves and the pilots in the air, and to them, mitigated speech from a pilot doesn’t mean the speaker is being appropriately deferential to a superior. It means the pilot doesn’t have a problem.
There is a point in the transcript where the cultural miscommunication between the controllers and Klotz becomes so evident that it is almost painful to read. It’s the last exchange between Avianca and the control tower, just minutes before the crash. Klotz has just said, “I guess so. Thank you very much” in response to the controller’s question about their fuel state. Captain Caviedes then turns to Klotz.
CAVIEDES: What did he say?
KLOTZ: The guy is angry.
Angry! Klotz’s feelings are hurt! His plane is moments from disaster. But he cannot escape the dynamic dictated to him by his culture in which subordinates must respect the dictates of their superiors. In his mind, he has tried and failed to communicate his plight, and his only conclusion is that he must have somehow offended his superiors in the control tower.
In the aftermath of the Kennedy crash, the management of Avianca airlines held a postmortem. Avianca had just had four accidents in quick succession—Barranquilla, Cucuta, Madrid, and New York—and all four cases, the airline concluded, “had to do with airplanes in perfect flight condition, aircrew without physical limitations and considered of average or above-average flight ability, and still the accidents happened.” (italics mine)
In the company’s Madrid crash, the report went on, the copilot tried to warn the captain about how dangerous the situation was:
The copilot was right. But they died because...when the copilot asked questions, his implied suggestions were very weak. The captain’s reply was to ignore him totally. Perhaps the copilot did not want to appear rebellious, questioning the judgment of the captain, or he did not want to play the fool because he knew that the pilot had a great deal of experience flying in that area. The copilot should have advocated for his own opinions in a stronger way...
Our ability to succeed at what we do is powerfully bound up with where we’re from, and being a good pilot and coming from a high–power distance culture is a difficult mix. Colombia by no means has the highest PDI, by the way. Helmreich and a colleague, Ashleigh Merritt, once measured the PDI of pilots from around the world. Number one was Brazil. Number two was South Korea.*
11.
The National Transportation Safety Board, the US agency responsible for investigating plane crashes, is headquartered in a squat, seventies-era office building on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, DC. Off the agency’s long hallways are laboratories filled with airplane wreckage: a mangled piece of an engine turbine, a problematic piece of a helicopter rotor. On a shelf in one of the laboratories is the cockpit voice and data recorder—the so-called black box—from the devastating ValuJet crash in Florida in 1996, in which 110 people were killed. The recorder is encased in a shoe box–size housing made out of thick hardened steel, and on one end of the box is a jagged hole, as if someone—or, rather, something—had driven a stake into it with tremendous force. Some of the NTSB investigators are engineers, who reconstruct crashes from the material evidence. Others are pilots. A surprising number of them, however, are psychologists, whose job it is to listen to the cockpit recorder and reconstruct what was said and done by the flight crew in the final minutes before a crash. One of the NTSB’s leading black-box specialists is a gangly fiftyish PhD psychologist named Malcolm Brenner, and Brenner was one of the investigators into the Korean Air crash in Guam.
“Normally that approach into Guam is not difficult,” Brenner began. Guam airport has what is called a glide scope, which is like a giant beam of light stretching up into the sky from the airport, and the pilot simply follows the beam all the way down to the runway. But on this particular night, the glide scope was down. “It was out of service,” Brenner said. “It had been sent to another island to be repaired. So there was a notice to airmen that the glide scope was not operating.”
In the grand scheme of things, this should not have been a big problem. In the month the glide scope had been under repair, there had been about fifteen hundred safe landings at Guam airport. It was just a small thing—an inconvenience, really—that made the task of landing a plane just a little bit more difficult.
“The second complication was the weather,” Brenner continued. “Normally in the South Pacific, you’ve got these brief weather situations. But they go by quickly. You don’t have storms. It’s a tropical paradise. But that night, there were some little cells, and it just happens that that evening, they were going to be flying into one of those little cells, a few miles from the airport. So the captain has to decide, What exactly is my procedure for landing? Well, they were cleared for what’s called a VOR/DME approach. It’s complicated. It’s a pain in the ass. It takes a lot of coordination to set it up. You have to come down in steps. But then, as it happens, from miles out, the captain sees the lights of Guam. So he relaxes. And he says, ‘We’re doing a visual approach.’”
The VOR is a beacon that sends out a signal that allows pilots to calculate their altitude as they approach an airport. It’s what pilots relied on before the invention of the glide scope. The captain’s strategy was to use the VOR to get the plane close and then, once he could see the lights of the runway, to land the plane visually. It seemed to make sense. Pilots do visual landings all the time. But every time a pilot chooses a plan, he is supposed to prepare a backup in case things go awry. And this captain didn’t.
“They should have been coordinating. He should have been briefing for the [DME] step-downs,” Brenner went on. “But he doesn’t talk about that. The s
torm cells are all around them, and what the captain seems to be doing is assuming that at some point he’s going to break out of the clouds and see the airport, and if he doesn’t see it by five hundred sixty feet, he’ll just go around. Now, that would work, except for one more thing. The VOR on which he’s basing this strategy is not at the airport. It’s two-point-five miles away on Nimitz Hill. There’s a number of airports in the world where this is true. Sometimes you can follow the VOR down and it takes you straight to the airport. Here if you follow the VOR down, it takes you straight to Nimitz Hill.”
The pilot knew about the VOR. It was clearly stated in the airport’s navigational charts. He’d flown into Guam eight times before, and in fact, he had specifically mentioned it in the briefing he gave before takeoff. But then again, it was one in the morning, and he’d been up since six a.m. the previous day.
“We believe that fatigue was involved,” Brenner went on. “It’s a back-of-the-clock flight. You fly in and arrive at one in the morning, Korean time. Then you spend a few hours on the ground, and you fly back as the sun is coming up. The captain has flown it a month before. In that case, he slept on the first-class seat. Now he’s flying in and says he’s really tired.”
So there they are, three classic preconditions of a plane crash, the same three that set the stage for Avianca 052: a minor technical malfunction; bad weather; and a tired pilot. By itself, none of these would be sufficient for an accident. But all three in combination require the combined efforts of everyone in the cockpit. And that’s where Korean Air 801 ran into trouble.
12.
Here is the flight recorder transcript of the final thirty minutes of KAL flight 801: It begins with the captain complaining of exhaustion.
0120:01. CAPTAIN: If this round-trip is more than a nine-hour trip, we might get a little something. With eight hours, we get nothing. Eight hours do not help us at all....They make us work to maximum, up to maximum. Probably this way...hotel expenses will be saved for cabin crews, and maximize the flight hours. Anyway, they make us...work to maximum.
There is the sound of a man shifting in his seat. A minute passes.
0121:13. CAPTAIN: Eh...really...sleepy. [unintelligible words]
FIRST OFFICER: Of course.
Then comes one of the most critical moments in the flight. The first officer decides to speak up:
FIRST OFFICER: Don’t you think it rains more? In this area, here?
The first officer must have thought long and hard before making that comment. He was not flying in the easy collegiality of Suren Ratwatte’s cockpit. Among Korean Air flight crews, the expectation on layovers used to be that the junior officers would attend to the captain to the point of making him dinner or purchasing him gifts. As one former Korean Air pilot puts it, the sensibility in many of the airline’s cockpits was that “the captain is in charge and does what he wants, when he likes, how he likes, and everyone else sits quietly and does nothing.” In the Delta report on Korean Air that was posted anonymously on the Internet, one of the auditors tells a story of sitting in on a Korean Air flight where the first officer got confused while listening to Air Traffic Control and mistakenly put the plane on a course intended for another plane. “The Flight Engineer picked up something was wrong but said nothing. First Officer was also not happy but said nothing....Despite [good] visual conditions, crew did not look out and see that current heading would not bring them to the airfield.” Finally the plane’s radar picks up the mistake, and then comes the key sentence: “Captain hit First Officer with the back of his hand for making the error.”
Hit him with the back of his hand?
When the three pilots all met that evening at Kimpo for their preflight preparation, the first officer and the engineer would have bowed to the captain. They would all have then shaken hands. “Cheo eom boeb seom ni da,” the copilot might have said, respectfully. “It is first time to meet you.” The Korean language has no fewer than six different levels of conversational address, depending on the relationship between the addressee and the addresser: formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain. The first officer would not have dared to use one of the more intimate or familiar forms when he addressed the captain. This is a culture in which enormous attention is paid to the relative standing of any two people in a conversation.
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?” 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.
Sohn gives the following conversation as an illustration, an exchange between an employee (Mr. Kim) and his boss, a division chief (kwacang).
KWACANG: It’s cold and I’m kind of hungry.
[MEANING: Why don’t you buy a drink or something to eat?]
MR. KIM: How about having a glass of liquor?
[MEANING: I will buy liquor for you.]
KWACANG: It’s okay. Don’t bother.
[MEANING: I will accept your offer if you repeat it.]
MR. KIM: You must be hungry. How about going out?
[MEANING: I insist upon treating you.]
KWACANG: Shall I do so?
[MEANING: I acc
ept.]
There is something beautiful in the subtlety of that exchange, in the attention that each party must pay to the motivations and desires of the other. It is civilized, in the truest sense of that word: it does not permit insensitivity or indifference.
But high–power distance communication works only when the listener is capable of paying close attention, and it works only if the two parties in a conversation have the luxury of time, in order to unwind each other’s meanings. It doesn’t work in an airplane cockpit on a stormy night with an exhausted pilot trying to land at an airport with a broken glide scope.
13.
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.”