Lucas Jung

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• December 26, 2009, on Foreign Airline Safety versus U.S. Major Airlines:

  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. M...