Outliers (18 page)
4.
That study is strange, isn’t it? It’s one thing to conclude that groups of people living in circumstances pretty similar to their ancestors’ act a lot like their ancestors. But those southerners in the hallway study weren’t living in circumstances similar to their British ancestors. They didn’t even necessarily have British ancestors. They just happened to have grown up in the South. None of them were herdsmen. Nor were their parents herdsmen. They were living in the late twentieth century, not the late nineteenth century. They were students at the University of Michigan, in one of the northernmost states in America, which meant they were sufficiently cosmopolitan to travel hundreds of miles from the south to go to college. And none of that mattered.
They still acted like they were living in nineteenth-century Harlan, Kentucky
.
“Your median student in those studies comes from a family making over a hundred thousand dollars, and that’s in nineteen ninety dollars,” Cohen says. “The southerners we see this effect with aren’t kids who come from the hills of Appalachia. They are more likely to be the sons of upper-middle management Coca-Cola executives in Atlanta. And that’s the big question. Why should we get this effect with them? Why should one get it hundreds of years later? Why are these suburban-Atlanta kids acting out the ethos of the frontier?”
*
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.
*
So far in
Outliers
we’ve seen that success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages: when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were all make a significant difference in how well you do in the world. The question for the second part of
Outliers
is whether the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our forebears can play the same role. Can we learn something about why people succeed and how to make people better at what they do by taking cultural legacies seriously? I think we can.
The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes
“CAPTAIN, THE WEATHER RADAR HAS HELPED US A LOT.”
1.
On the morning of August 5, 1997, the captain of Korean Air flight 801 woke at six. His family would later tell investigators that he went to the gym for an hour, then came home and studied the flight plan for that evening’s journey to Guam. He napped and ate lunch. At three in the afternoon, he left for Seoul, departing early enough, his wife said, to continue his preparations at Kimpo International Airport. He had been a pilot with Korean Air for almost four years after coming over from the Korean Air Force. He had eighty-nine hundred hours of flight time, including thirty-two hundred hours of experience in jumbo jets. A few months earlier, he had been given a flight safety award by his airline for successfully handling a jumbo-jet engine failure at low altitude. He was forty-two years old and in excellent health, with the exception of a bout of bronchitis that had been diagnosed ten days before.
At seven p.m., the captain, his first officer, and the flight engineer met and collected the trip’s paperwork. They would be flying a Boeing 747—the model known in the aviation world as the “classic.” The aircraft was in perfect working order. It had once been the Korean presidential plane. Flight 801 departed the gate at ten-thirty in the evening and was airborne twenty minutes later. Takeoff was without incident. Just before one-thirty in the morning, the plane broke out of the clouds, and the flight crew glimpsed lights off in the distance.
“Is it Guam?” the flight engineer asked. Then, after a pause, he said, “It’s Guam, Guam.”
The captain chuckled. “Good!”
The first officer reported to Air Traffic Control (ATC) that the airplane was “clear of Charlie Bravo [cumulonimbus clouds]” and requested “radar vectors for runway six left.”
The plane began its descent toward Guam airport. They would make a visual approach, the captain said. He had flown into Guam airport from Kimpo eight times previously, most recently a month ago, and he knew the airport and the surrounding terrain well. The landing gear went down. The flaps were extended ten degrees. At 01:41 and 48 seconds, the captain said, “Wiper on,” and the flight engineer turned them on. It was raining. The first officer then said, “Not in sight?” He was looking for the runway. He couldn’t see it. One second later, the Ground Proximity Warning System called out in its electronic voice: “Five hundred [feet].” The plane was five hundred feet off the ground. But how could that be if they couldn’t see the runway? Two seconds passed. The flight engineer said, “Eh?” in an astonished tone of voice.
At 01:42 and 19 seconds, the first officer said, “Let’s make a missed approach,” meaning, Let’s pull up and make a large circle and try the landing again.
One second later, the flight engineer said, “Not in sight.” The first officer added, “Not in sight, missed approach.”
At 01:42 and 22 seconds, the flight engineer said again, “Go around.”
At 01:42 and 23 seconds, the captain repeated, “Go around,” but he was slow to pull the plane out of its descent.
At 01:42 and 26 seconds, the plane hit the side of Nimitz Hill, a densely vegetated mountain three miles southwest of the airport—$60 million and 212,000 kilograms of steel slamming into rocky ground at one hundred miles per hour. The plane skidded for two thousand feet, severing an oil pipeline and snapping pine trees, before falling into a ravine and bursting into flames. By the time rescue workers reached the crash site, 228 of the 254 people on board were dead.
2.
Twenty years before the crash of KAL 801, a Korean Air Boeing 707 wandered into Russian airspace and was shot down by a Soviet military jet over the Barents Sea. It was an accident, meaning the kind of rare and catastrophic event that, but for the grace of God, could happen to any airline. It was investigated and analyzed. Lessons were learned. Reports were filed.
Then, two years later, a Korean Air Boeing 747 crashed in Seoul. Two accidents in two years is not a good sign. Three years after that, the airline lost another 747 near Sakhalin Island, in Russia, followed by a Boeing 707 that went down over the Andaman Sea in 1987, two more crashes in 1989 in Tripoli and Seoul, and then another in 1994 in Cheju, South Korea.
*
To put that record in perspective, the “loss” rate for an airline like the American carrier United Airlines in the period 1988 to 1998 was .27 per million departures, which means that they lost a plane in an accident about once in every four million flights. The loss rate for Korean Air, in the same period, was 4.79 per million departures—more than
seventeen
times higher.
Korean Air’s planes were crashing so often that when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)—the US agency responsible for investigating plane crashes within American jurisdiction—did its report on the Guam crash, it was forced to include an addendum listing all the new Korean Air accidents that had happened just since its investigation began: the Korean Air 747 that crash-landed at Kimpo in Seoul, almost a year to the day after Guam; the jetliner that overran a runway at Korea’s Ulsan Airport eight weeks after that; the Korean Air McDonnell Douglas 83 that rammed into an embankment at Pohang Airport the following March; and then, a month after that, the Korean Air passenger jet that crashed in a residential area of Shanghai. Had the NTSB waited just a few more months, it could have added another: the Korean Air cargo plane that crashed just after takeoff from London’s Stansted airport, despite the fact that a warning bell went off in the cockpit no fewer than fourteen times.
In April 1999, Delta Air Lines and Air France suspended their flying partnership with Korean Air. In short order, the US Army, which maintains thousands of troops in South Korea, forbade its personnel from flying with the airline. South Korea’s safety rating was downgraded by the US Federal Aviation Authority, and Canadian officials informed Korean Air’s management that they were considering revoking the company’s overflight and landing privileges in Canadian airspace.
In the midst of the controversy, an outside audit of Korean Air’s operations was leaked to the public. The forty-page report was quickly denounced by Korean Air officials as sensationalized and unrepresentative, but by that point, it was too late to save the company’s reputation. The audit detailed instances of flight crews smoking cigarettes on the tarmac during refueling and in the freight area; and when the plane was in the air. “Crew read newspapers throughout the flight,” the audit stated, “often with newspapers held up in such a way that if a warning light came on, it would not be noticed.” The report detailed bad morale, numerous procedural violations, and the alarming conclusion that training standards for the 747 “classic” were so poor that “there is some concern as to whether First Officers on the Classic fleet could land the aircraft if the Captain became totally incapacitated.”
By the time of the Shanghai crash, the Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, felt compelled to speak up. “The issue of Korean Air is not a matter of an individual company but a matter of the whole country,” he said. “Our country’s credibility is at stake.” Dae-jung then switched the presidential plane from Korean Air to its newer rival, Asiana.
But then a small miracle happened. Korean Air turned itself around. Today, the airline is a member in good standing of the prestigious SkyTeam alliance. Its safety record since 1999 is spotless. In 2006, Korean Air was given the Phoenix Award by Air Transport World in recognition of its transformation. Aviation experts will tell you that Korean Air is now as safe as any airline in the world.
In this chapter, we’re going to conduct a crash investigation: listen to the “black box” cockpit recorder; examine the flight records; look at the weather and the terrain and the airport conditions; and compare the Guam crash with other very similar plane crashes, all in an attempt to understand precisely how the company transformed itself from the worst kind of outlier into one of the world’s best airlines. It is a complex and sometimes strange story. But it turns on a very simple fact, the same fact that runs through the tangled history of Harlan and the Michigan students. Korean Air did not succeed—it did not right itself—until it acknowledged the importance of its cultural legacy.
3.
Planes crashes rarely happen in real life the same way they happen in the movies. Some engine part does not explode in a fiery bang. The rudder doesn’t suddenly snap under the force of takeoff. The captain doesn’t gasp, “Dear God,” as he’s thrown back against his seat. The typical commercial jetliner—at this point in its stage of development—is about as dependable as a toaster. Plane crashes are much more likely to be the result of an accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions.
*
In a typical crash, for example, the weather is poor— not terrible, necessarily, but bad enough that the pilot feels a little bit more stressed than usual. In an overwhelming number of crashes, the plane is behind schedule, so the pilots are hurrying. In 52 percent of crashes, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for twelve hours or more, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply. And 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they’re not comfortable with each other. Then the errors start—and it’s not just one error. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on top of that, and then another and another and another
and another,
and it is the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster.
These seven errors, furthermore, are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps—and somehow the pilots fail to coordinate and miss one of them.
“The whole flight-deck design is intended to be operated by two people, and that operation works best when you have one person checking the other, or both people willing to participate,” says Earl Weener, who was for many years chief engineer for safety at Boeing. “Airplanes are very unforgiving if you don’t do things right. And for a long time it’s been clear that if you have two people operating the airplane cooperatively, you will have a safer operation than if you have a single pilot flying the plane and another person who is simply there to take over if the pilot is incapacitated.”
Consider, for example, the famous (in aviation circles, anyway) crash of the Colombian airliner Avianca flight 052 in January of 1990. The Avianca accident so perfectly illustrates the characteristics of the “modern” plane crash that it is studied in flight schools. In fact, what happened to that flight is so similar to what would happen seven years later in Guam that it’s a good place to start our investigation into the mystery of Korean Air’s plane crash problem.
The captain of the plane was Laureano Caviedes. His first officer was Mauricio Klotz. They were en route from Medellin, Colombia, to New York City’s Kennedy Airport. The weather that evening was poor. There was a nor’easter up and down the East Coast, bringing with it dense fog and high winds. Two hundred and three flights were delayed at Newark Airport. Two hundred flights were delayed at LaGuardia Airport, 161 at Philadelphia, 53 at Boston’s Logan Airport, and 99 at Kennedy. Because of the weather, Avianca was held up by Air Traffic Control three times on its way to New York. The plane circled over Norfolk, Virginia, for nineteen minutes, above Atlantic City for twenty-nine minutes, and forty miles south of Kennedy Airport for another twenty-nine minutes.