Malcolm Gladwell made the mistake of ascribing a very complex set of circumstances to a single cause. You made the same mistake. In reality, culture, experience, and a host of other factors all come together to determine mishap rates: maintenance quality, equipment age, safety equipment, company procedures, ATC quality, airfield quality, predominant weather conditions, terrain, migratory bird patterns, language barriers, etc. Experience is almost certainly a bigger factor than culture, but culture is still a very big factor: why else would the majors spend millions of dollars every year on CRM training? To see just how much of a factor this is, look at how mishap rates plummeted after the introduction of CRM training at US carriers in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Prior to widespread CRM training, the culture at major US carriers was largely as Gladwell describes current foreign carrier culture: the captain's word was final, and co-pilots didn't speak up or contradict the captain. Multiple studies found this to be a major source of mishaps, which is one of the major reasons for the introduction of CRM training. You also have to consider how inexperience is exacerbated by this type of culture: consider two equally inexperienced co-pilots who each notice the same unsafe condition on two separate flights. The co-pilot for the airline with bad culture will be afraid to point out the problem, thinking to himself, "My captain has thousands of hours more experience than I: he certainly must have noticed the problem, and would do something about it if it concerned him. I don't want to incur his wrath and/or ridicule by distracting him with such a minor problem." The co-pilot for the airline with good culture will be far more likely to speak up, possibly averting a mishap.
-- Lucas Jung, December 26, 2009
Lucas: CRM is well-known and has been taught for decades at foreign carriers as well. As far as the improving safety record of U.S. airlines goes, consider that the period you're describing is also the period when terrain awareness systems were installed (as far as I know, no airliner equipped with a moving-map GPS-based TAWS system has been crashed into a mountain), when engines became much more reliable, when systems in general became simpler and more reliable, and when ground-based systems were substantially enhanced (weather radar feeds to ATC, more ILSes, etc.). The handful of hours of CRM training delivered to airline pilots during those decades may have made a difference, but (1) the effect is hard to separate from safety improvements due to improved technology, and (2) CRM training was delivered more or less equally at foreign carriers.
-- Philip Greenspun, December 29, 2009
As a 20 year airline pilot I do disagree with the US vs foreign pilot argument, but I will leave that alone as it will involve pages of refutory evidence. There is some basis of fact in what you say, but it is simplistic and, well, thats enough on that...As for flying to JFK. New York is to most airlines who fly heavy jets effectively a third world airport. It is a nightmare to taxi around, as it is way way to small (was designed for 707's max) and aside from seemingly nothing working the way it should and being way way too overcrowded, the controllers make no allowance for non US-English speaking crews. My airline flies around the world and the US is difficult full stop. Unlike almost anywhere else it takes a LOT of practice and understanding of US culture to fully know what is really being said. And our airline is also from an English speaking nation. The problem is that US pilots and controllers _generally_ only operate in the USA and deal with people who have grown up in the same country. For example, at LAX, a standard call on GRD frequency was to switch from Nth to Sth controllers 'at the 50 yard line'. What the HELL does that mean for anyone who did not happen to play US college football in the USA?? Another example - even in China you might be cleared direct to a VOR. They will NEVER make a comment (in heavily accented and highly colloqial US English) like 'JA you can head to Urumqi when you can'. They will speak in concise and aviation standard 'AJA when clear of weather direct URC'. And Americans make it way worse. URC VOR can be reasonably deduced as being related to Urumqi. What about something like the Wilkes Barre VOR's ident of LVZ?? Yet US controllers NEVER use the LVZ terminology, but always the full (and often indecipherable) 'JA you can head to Wilkes Barre when you can'. Totally foreign words to totally foreign ears about totally foreign places. Do you turn left or right? How do you spell Wilkes Barre? Which Map is it on? Is it an FMC Ident or a place name? For those reading this who don't know, aviation charts are not labelled clearly with place names, but three letter code Morse code identifier letters. And at JFK in particular, the talent for running seemingly dozens of taxi instructions at you in one sentence of very heavy New York 'English' is second to none. Sure the controller may say the same thing 200 times a week for 3 years, but to a foreign crew (who might only operate into JFK once a year) and after being at work for sometimes up to 20 hours at a time, such gibberish is at best near indecipherable, at worst dangerous with just the aid of a dimly lit small chart on possibly slippery, icy and the certainly very narrow taxiway's of JFK. And in heavy snow, the taxiway lights at JFK are non existant. I heard one Asian crew make a very understandable error (so understandable we earlier had to stop and get abused by the controller to make sure we didn't make the same exact error). The extremely irate controller said extremely quickly in a VERY thick NYC accent 'XYZ if ya cant follow simple instructions then we'll sin bin ya on Zulu (taxiway)' I sympathise with the workload at JFK, but it is absolutely NOT a favourable aviation environment for anyone without a VERY thorough understanding of how things 'really' work there. We once got stuck along with everyone else in a bizarre traffic jam in JFK. In a beautiful crisp English accented voice the words came over the radio 'I am slowly losing the will to live (at JFK!)' Americans CAN do it very well. It took a while for them to really standardise the operation to what the international rule book says and also for them to understand 'international' English. The internatinal aviation rule book which, it must be said, was worded primarily by the US so you would think it should be fairly easy to get it right... However, once they did master it, the controlling the USAF now provides over Afghanistan in particular (which used to be horrendous with minimal equipment and multiple countries who all hate each other converging in one place etc etc) is now exceptional. I am sure I am not alone in the hope those controllers go home and mix with their US couterparts and explain that it is often very hard to operate over foreign countries with many different accents and backgrounds and work out what it is that people (pilots) are really trying to say to each other and to Air Traffic Control. Familiarity is great (and often very humorous) but only if you are actually familiar!!!
-- james lawson, May 10, 2010
The US is a little over 4% of the world's population. Can you see how parochial it sounds to speak of the 96% of the world as a single group, inferior in this case, and label them "foreigners". There is a huge range of safety performance of airlines across the globe, including in the USA. I don't feel as safe on an American airline as I do on some Asian, European and my own Australian Qantas. The whole analysis comes across as being in a Xenophobic spirit. The original author's thesis would not have been out of place in the intellectual milieu of master race superiority that lead to Nazi Germany,
-- Ashley Bear, June 9, 2010
I think you have rather substantially misinterpreted the point of Gladwell's chapter in Outliers. It's not at all about the relative safety of U.S. versus foreign pilots. It simply picks up on the well known psychological literature looking at how cultural differences in "power distance" affect pilot performance. He really only singles out Colombia and South Korea--and in the case of South Korea points out how they overcame that cultural disadvantage. It's probably a good idea to read a book closely before being so scornful of its message.
-- Arthur Simons, September 4, 2010