Outliers

Gladwell opens this chapter with a description of the crash of Korean Air flight 801 in Guam, in 1997. After reviewing the basics of what happened, he goes back 20 years to show a pattern of accidents involving the same airline. He explains that accidents are almost never caused by one large factor; instead, it’s a series of small factors that—taken together—result in a crash. Many involve flights that are behind schedule, have a pilot who has been awake for 12 or more hours, and involve a cockpit crew who are flying together for the first time. It inevitably comes down to “errors of teamwork and communication” (184).

Gladwell then presents the crash of a plane from a Colombian airline arriving at New York’s Kennedy Airport in 1990. He reviews what happened using the above rubric of a series of errors and breakdown in communication. In this case, the plane ran out of fuel during delays caused by a storm. Communication played the key role in how this happened. The New York air traffic controllers were known for being assertive to the point of brusque; conversely, the Colombian pilots were far more deferential in their speech patterns, according to their culture. In speaking with the control tower, the first officer of the plane seemed to have no sense of urgency in his words or the tone he used even though the plane was dangerously low on fuel. Not sensing any problem, the flight controllers gave instructions for a wide loop after an attempted landing was aborted. It was too far to go, and the plane crashed over Long Island.

On a measurement of attitudes toward hierarchy, called the “Power Distance Index,” Colombia scores high and the United States scores low. This means there’s a big difference with how each culture treats authority, which played a role in the 1990 crash. Seen in this light, the Colombian first officer thought he was conveying information clearly to the control tower while being respectful, but the American flight controllers would have expected a much more direct, urgent message to understand that the plane was in trouble.

The chapter ends by explaining the Korean Air crash in Guam from the perspective of speech patterns and the Power Distance Index. Like Colombia, Korea has a high score on the index. This resulted in copilots and navigators being afraid to call out problems when the captain was piloting the plane—exactly what happened in the Guam accident. In 2000, the airline brought in an aviation expert from the United States to help them overcome such difficulties and reduce their accident rate. It was successful, in part, because the expert made all the flight staff speak in English rather than Korean. This helped them shed the deferential identity of their native culture and be more open in communicating. The result was a sharp drop in crashes and accidents, and a safety record equal to any other airline by the mid-2000s.