Wide Angle 21 - Plane Crashes and Power Distance

The cold seems to have eased just a bit here. This week was pretty busy and Friday is here again. Time for another Wide Angle. This time it is about something very interesting that I had read sometime back, it will be slightly long but quite interesting. This is from a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. He is one of my favorite reads because he does much more of what I do on a little scale – analyzes lives, situations and comes up with theories. His first book was called “The Tipping Point” which I am sure most have heard about and many have read. His second book was “Blink” and “Outliers” is his third book. The book is about people who are “outliers” in any field and what it is that contributes to them being so – I will write a detailed Wide Angle on the book itself some day. Today’s write up is about a chapter from that book called “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes”.
The chapter primarily focuses on plane crashes that happen around the world but specifically about Korean Air. Korean Air had a notorious record of plane crashes and beginning from 1997 where a major air crash on a flight from Seoul to Guam in the South Pacific. This plane crash happened because of the plane not being able to spot the runway during its landing due to extremely bad weather and hence crashing into a nearby hill – the crash killed 228 out of the 254 people on board. Twenty years prior to this, a Korean Air Boeing 707 wandered into Russian airspace and was shot down. Two years after that, a Korean Air Boeing 747 crashed in Seoul. Three years after that, the airline lost another 747 near Sakhalin Island in Russia, followed by a Boeing 707 that crashed over the Andaman sea in 1987 and then another in Cheju, South Korea. If compared with other airlines, the “loss rate” of Korean airline was 4.79 crashes per million departures while that of an American carrier United Airlines was 0.27 per million departures.
The problem continued with another 747 crashing a year after the Guam crash, a jetliner overran a runway at Korea’s Ulsan airport eight weeks after that, a Korean McDonnell Douglas 83 that rammed into an embankment at Pohang airport the following March and then a month after that, a Korean Air passenger jet crashed in a residential area of Shanghai. After a few months, a Korean Air cargo plane crashed just after takeoff from London’s Stansted airport despite the fact that a warning bell went off in the cockpit fourteen times. In April 1999, Delta Airlines and Air France suspended their flying partnership with Korean Air. There were videos circulated of Korean Air crew slacking off and it was a major PR disaster as much that the Korean President had to speak up to shore up confidence in it. But then a small miracle happened with Korean Air turning around and today it is a member of the prestigious SkyTeam alliance. Its safety record since 1999 is spotless and experts will tell you that KA is the safest airline in the world. What happened that changed this…intriguing isn’t it?
The chapter that goes into details of what is common in plane crashes – in general, it is not one big thing that goes wrong like they show in movies but a series of small things going wrong that add up to an accident. In a typical crash – the weather is poor, not terrible but bad enough to stress the pilot more than usual. In many crashes, the plane is behind schedule so the pilot is hurried. In 52 percent of the crashes, the pilot has been flying and awake for more than 12 hours at a stretch, meaning he is tired and not thinking sharply. 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they are not comfortable with each other. Then the errors start – a typical accident involves seven consecutive errors. They may be conducted by the first pilot who tends to do something which is compounded by the co-pilot making another mistake, which may lead to another and so on. The errors are not problems of knowledge or flying skill. The kind of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication (Sounds familiar?). One pilot knows something important and doesn’t tell the other. One pilot does something wrong and the other doesn’t catch the error. An airplane operates best when the two pilots work in tandem and it is much safer than when a single pilot is flying the plane and another person simply is there when the first person is not in a position to pilot anymore.
This is where the ethnic theory of plane crashes comes in to play. It has been observed that most of the plane crashes have been in Asian or South American airlines. Let me explain a concept called Power Distance Index (PDI) which is quite prevalent amongst many studies. It simply refers to cultures and the premium that is placed on hierarchies in that culture - how much the individual matters more than the collective (e.g. Americans have a very low PDI and the individual there matters more than the collective i.e.society). This concept is based on some outstanding work done by a Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede who worked for IBM HR in Europe. The Hofstede’s dimensions are amongst most widely used paradigms in cross-cultural psychology – they essentially differentiate cultures based on how well they tolerate ambiguity. It is worth noting that the cultures with high tolerance of ambiguity are also ones with a high PDI which means that there is a great deal of layering in communication between people. In low PDI countries, power is something that power holders almost ashamed of and they try to underplay it. In high PDI countries, power is a status symbol and everyone is expected to kowtow to people in power. When a study was done on pilots across the world, imagine which country was at the top of the PDI ratings in terms of its pilots – South Korea.
Put simply, it means that there was a very unequal power balance between the pilot and the co-pilot in the cockpit of Korean Air. This meant that the co-pilot and first engineer simply didn’t speak clearly if they saw something going wrong or their pilot making a mistake. Here is a brief transcript of the final thirty minutes of the Guam flight before it went down. The situation was that the light beacon that showed the way to planes in Guam was in disrepair so the pilot decided to go for a visual landing. He had flown 12 hours straight and was quite tired. For a visual landing, clear weather would have helped but they were going straight into a storm and eventually they couldn’t come out of it soon enough before landing to see where they were going and crashed into a hill. The captain said “This flight is too long, they make us work to maximum.”. After a minute he says,”Eh…really…sleepy”. The first officer replies “Of course”. Then comes one of the most critical moments in the flight when the first officer decides to speak up: “Don’t you think it rains more in this area?”. What he meant to say was “Captain, you have committed us to a visual approach, with no backup plan and the weather is terrible. You think that we will break out of the clouds in time to see the runway, what if we don’t. Its pitch black outside and pouring rain and the gliding beacon is down.” He can’t say that because of the PDI so he only hints.
The next moment, the plane breaks out of the clouds and the flight engineer says “Is it Guam, yes it is”. The pilot says “Good”. But it is not good, they have simply come out of clouds for a moment. They are still twenty miles from the airport and there is enormous amount of bad weather ahead which the flight engineer can see on his radar so now he decides to speak up. “Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot”, he says. A second hint from the flight deck, what he really meant was “This is not a night where you can rely on eyes to land the plane. Look at what the weather radar is telling us: there’s trouble ahead”. The captain says “Yes, they are very useful.” He isn’t listening. The plane is flying toward a VOR beacon which is on the side of the mountain and they don’t see it. At 1:41:48, “Wiper on” and the flight engineer turns the wiper on.
At 1:41:59, the first officer asks, ”Not in sight?”. He is looking for the runway and he can’t see it. He has had a sinking feeling in his stomach for some time now. One second later, the Ground Proximity Warning System calls out “Five hundred feet”. The plane is five hundred feet off the ground. The ground in this case is the Nimitz hill but the crew thinks that the ground is the runway but they can’t see it. At 1:42:19, the first officer finally says “Let us make a missed approach”. 1:42:20 First Engineer: “Not in sight”. But it is too late, the plane crashes in the next 20 seconds. As you can see, if the first officer had simply said what he meant to say when he said “Don’t you think it rains more?”, things would have been much different. This is what happens in a high PDI culture where the distance between the boss and subordinates is so high that the subordinates simply leave everything to the boss to run and merely follow orders and are very subtle when it comes to giving bad news.
How did the miraculous turnaround happen for Korean Air then? They hired an outsider from Delta Airlines, David Greenberg to run their flight operations. He evaluated the English language skills of the crews and found that they were very poor. What he essentially did was to dictate that the lingua franca of Korean Air was going to be English from then on. Everyone was trained in English and it was mandated that only English be spoken in the cockpit. It also gelled well with the fact that the language of aviation world over is English. English is a very low PDI language where the only way of addressing someone is “You”. Compare that with our languages where there is an “aap”, “tum” and a “tu”. This worked wonders for KA with the cultural baggage and the PDI suddenly being left at the door of the cockpit and crashes came down to nil. Straight communication between members of the cockpit and the captain being one of the “team” simply changed the game here.
I hope I was able to clearly explain the concept to you. My take is that the best running sectors in India e.g. the IT industry are because the language of transactions is English which also means a lower PDI. More often than not, we leave our cultural baggage outside the office door when we enter. The situation in government and other industries is not as happy where the higher you go, more insulated you become. Politics is the worst example where there are numerous sycophants and hangers-on for a minister. I had seen an example of this. We were leaving our rented house in Bangalore. A very well educated and dressed man came to see it in the afternoon and then said he will come back in the evening with his “sahib” . He was the manager of some Manufacturing company and his Saheb was a senior manager. The Saheb came in the evening with this same guy and was like a mini-minister with everyone making way for him etc. Kind of explains the whole story.
To conclude, higher PDI often leads to leaders living in unreal worlds because no one tells them the bad news, in fact those who do are persecuted. However, a good leader always needs to have his ears to the ground and look for bad news because that can often be the true picture. This goes back to Wide Angle 5 – Animal Farm where I had said that a leader had to guard against the “I am always right” feeling. If not, any entity, a team, a division, an organization or a government would go the way of Korean Air Flight 801.
Please let me know what you thought of this article. Apologize for the length – there was just so much to say.