Consider: The co-pilot, with significantly more B777 experience, did not challenge the captain’s throttle settings, airspeed or anything. The captain was allowed to save face, all the way to impact.
Both should be fired and sent to jail.
And the "co-pilot" would certainly have been a more senior captain who outranked the pilot in the captain's seat, which makes it even stranger.
That’s what it looks like. Don’t embarrass your superior on his first trip in the big-boy seat. If they were conversing in Korean, we’ll never know what cultural codewords and timidly understated observations and face-saving euphemisms were going back and forth in that cockpit.
Someone posted on another crash thread yesterday that he is a 777 pilot who flies out of SFO.
He said that asian pilots [due to their culture] give tremendous defference to the pilot in command - even when they see things going wrong.
Something about respecting authority ...
I’m not sure if it was in “The Checklist Manifesto” or one of the Malcolm Gladwell books, but there was a Korean jumbo jet that crashed and killed all on board some decades ago because a problem seen by the copilot was not effectively communicated to the Captain due an excess of cultural deference to authority.
The book said that this problem had been addressed, but perhaps it hasn’t.