Posted on 07/10/2013 7:58:51 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
Thank you very much for this post! This was a real eye-opener for me. My take away lesson from this is that if at all possible avoid an Asian airline if a good alternative exists, even if the alternative costs more.
very compelling piece. I have no idea if its true or not, but makes sense...especially the cultural training and rote memory education.
That was an extraordinarily fascinating article.
From what he said in the article, it wasn’t really a matter of the odds catching up with them, it was more of an issue of maintaining the same accident rate that they had in the past.
I’m not all that well informed about civil aviation (even though I do have a subscription to Aviation and Space Weekly… I know a little bit more) but I had no inkling It was this kind of issue.
I’m really interested now… I wonder what other countries in the region are like in comparison. The Japanese? The Chinese? The Filipinos?
It’s interesting, I would think that even though the Koreans and the Japanese are culturally at each other’s throat, there are certain characteristics that both possess (that the author talked about in this article such as the inability to confront the authority etc.)
Even with that, I would be very surprised to hear that Japan had generally poor pilots in the same fashion. It seems like it would be completely out of character. It is as if they couldn’t bear to be incompetent pilots. (This is all conjecture on my part, I have no idea about any of this.)
That’s why I find this really interesting. I just assumed that the Koreans would have pretty decent pilots generally.
My experience with the ROK Army is much the same. Very bright guys who are technically competent, but can’t think for themselves and cannot think out of the box in a tactical situation.
Excellent and also scary as hell post.
Ping.
Don’t you find this article fascinating? I was almost mesmerized reading it.
It was like opening a door to new world. Of course, now that I think of it, they would have expats like this guy doing training, and I can just see the problems he was describing.
In my experience with aviation, is brutally honest profession in a certain way. There are certain things that you just cannot lie your way through. As such, good training would, by necessity, be coldly frank and direct.
A culture clash in that particular area could indeed have real ramifications on training quality.
Yes, quite true. It's a cultural thing with Asians in particular.
I can't remember the last time I heard about a Japanese commercial airline crash without some kind of weather complication. I don't think this has anything to do with rote memorization - these people were just cutting corners. They failed to go through every scenario possible. There's no creative thinking going on here - pilots are simply doing what others who came before them did in order to get out of sticky situations. These people did the minimum necessary to pass the tests instead of going above and beyond to make sure they could handle all eventualities.
Just another reason to vacation in the good old USofA.
We have beaches, mountains,a giant waterfall and the world’s biggest hole.
I fly KAL on a semi regular basis and without sitting in a cockpit, it certainly seems like a well run airline.
(Fingers crossed).
Mooshell is a tourist site?
I’ve flown alone and with my family with almost all the Asian carriers.
I make it a practice to avoid American carriers on all my international flights.
For me the level of service the Asian carriers provide is so much superior than anything an American carrier offers makes it worth flying with them.
I’ve heard the rumors on training but I suspect its the only way American carriers can put butts in the seats..by scaring folks into flying with them.
It makes them sound intellectually lazy, and I wouldn’t have thought that either.
This is just odd, and as another poster said...scary.
Are you saying that strictly from a passenger sense or from a nuts and bolts being in the hands of competent pilots?
If you have to choose an Asian airline, Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines hire cockpit personnel based on skill, not nationality, and have lots of Kiwi, Aussie, European and US pilots. The rest have pretty flight attendants, but I wouldn't risk my life just to have good-looking women waiting on me.
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