In the early hours of August 6, 1997, Korean Air Flight 801 was coming down toward Guam with 254 people on board. The glideslope, the radio beam that guides a jet down at the right angle, had been out of service since July 7. The flight engineer asked, “is the glideslope working? glideslope? yeh?” The captain answered, “yes, yes, it’s working.” The first officer said, “not useable.” Two minutes later the captain asked, “isn’t glideslope working?” The recorder has no sign that anyone answered.
The captain took the 747 below the step-down altitudes for that part of the approach, 2,000 feet and then 1,440 feet. Nobody challenged him. The first officer said, “not in sight?” The terrain warning called “minimums minimums,” then “sink rate.” The first officer replied, “sink rate okay.”
Then he said, “let’s make a missed approach.” By the count of the National Transportation Safety Board, there were six seconds left.
Well known, and not only in Korea
Why didn’t he speak sooner? The NTSB could not tell whether the first officer and flight engineer were poorly prepared, missed the errors, or were unwilling to confront the captain. It called problems with subordinates challenging a captain “well known,” and its evidence came from American airlines: in its study of crew-involved major accidents at US carriers, more than 80 percent happened with the captain flying. Among contributing factors it listed the captain’s fatigue, Korean Air’s inadequate crew training, and the FAA’s intentional inhibition of a low-altitude warning system at Guam. It does not name national culture as a cause.
A popular theory goes further. As Foreign Policy described it in 2013, writing about Korean aviation, it holds that cultures emphasizing hierarchy are more prone to dangerous flights, because lower-ranking crew are reluctant to challenge the pilot. Malcolm Gladwell has endorsed it.
Silence below a captain happens everywhere, then. What differs between countries, on average, is how wide the gap between ranks feels. People in different countries expect different things from a boss.
Measured from below
Around 1970 IBM surveyed its employees in more than 50 countries; most parts of the company were surveyed twice, four years apart, for more than 100,000 questionnaires. Geert Hofstede, who had set up IBM’s personnel research department in the 1960s, took the database for his own research. Looking at individuals, he later wrote, the data “proved confusing.” When he compared country averages instead, clear patterns appeared. The first was dependence on superiors.
His 1980 book, Culture’s Consequences, set out four dimensions; later work brought the total to six. The one closest to that cockpit is power distance, which Hofstede defined as “the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.” It is measured from below, from what the less powerful accept, not from what bosses demand. In his summary table, subordinates in low power distance societies “expect to be consulted”; in high ones they “expect to be told what to do.” Scores tend to be higher in East European, Latin, Asian and African countries and lower in Germanic and English-speaking Western ones.
The pattern reaches the flight deck. In 2000 Ashleigh Merritt, of the University of Texas at Austin, analyzed surveys from 9,400 male airline pilots in 19 countries. With her revised analysis, their country scores on power distance correlated .87 with Hofstede’s. She concluded that national culture shapes cockpit behavior over and above pilots’ shared professional culture.
Rainfall, not weather
A country’s score is like a city’s average rainfall. It can tell you to pack an umbrella, not whether the person in front of you is carrying one.
Hofstede said so himself. The link between culture and personality is statistical, he wrote, and “national culture scores should not be used for stereotyping individuals.” He added that more than half of 180 studies using his work, in one review, failed to separate the country level from the individual level.
The gap inside countries is large. A 2016 meta-analysis of 558 studies by Vas Taras, Piers Steel and Bradley Kirkman found that about 80 percent of the variation in the cultural values it covered lies within countries. For power distance, only 20.8 percent of the variation was between countries; differences between occupations accounted for 50.1 percent.
Korean Air’s own story leaves room for that reading. The New York Times, describing a 1999 Delta review, pointed to senior pilots who tended to ignore warnings from copilots, especially their former Air Force subordinates. The fixes were organizational: new training and testing standards, and promotions based on merit.
There are other limits. Hofstede noted that individualism and low power distance both rise with national wealth, and that for things tied to wealth, correlations with culture usually disappear once wealth is controlled. In 2002 the management scholar Brendan McSweeney challenged the assumptions behind the claim to have uncovered national cultures, and questioned whether national cultures systematically cause behavior at all.
The engineer who went quiet
Imagine a project lead in Toronto who inherits an engineer transferred from a Seoul office. He has read about power distance scores, so he gives her detailed instructions and stops asking what she thinks. She left her last team because her managers never asked. By the third meeting she has stopped offering ideas, and he takes her silence as proof that the score was right.
Asked how she prefers to raise disagreement, she might have told him. The score was a prompt to check his own assumptions, not a forecast about her.
The NTSB pointed to a structural fix as well. Captains, it noted, are more likely to be comfortable correcting first officers than the reverse, so some airlines have the first officer fly the approach while the captain monitors. That doesn’t ask anyone to become braver. It puts the person who finds it easier to speak up in the seat where speaking up matters.
On Flight 801 the first officer’s doubt came out first as a question: “not in sight?” His call for a missed approach came 20 seconds later.