By taking cultural legacies seriously, we can learn something about why people succeed and how to make them better at what they do
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 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. An acknowledgment of the importance of cultural legacy is essential to understanding this gap.
Mitigated speech and the power distance index account for the majority of these crashes. Through a series of studies and investigations, it has been found that where a pilot or copilot comes from determines the kind of communicative skills they possess.
Mitigated speech is an attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. It has six different levels namely:
- Hint
- Preference
- Query
- Crew Suggestion
- Crew Obligation Statement
- Command.
Combatting mitigation has become one of the great crusades in commercial aviation in the past fifteen years.
Greece, Portugal, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Belgium are the most reliant countries on rules and plans and are most likely to stick to procedures regardless of circumstances. Hong Kong, Sweden, Denmark, Jamaica, and Singapore are the cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity
Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.
In low power distance index (PDI) countries, power is something of which power holders are almost ashamed and they will try to underplay. When a pilot from a low PDI country has a copilot from a high PDI country, they may have issues working together. There will be a communication gap that may be disastrous for the plane and the passengers.
Our ability to succeed at what we do is powerfully bound up with where we’re from, and being a good pilot and coming from a high-power distance culture is a difficult mix. The top five pilot PDIs by country are Brazil, South Korea, Morocco, Mexico, and the Philippines. The five lowest pilot PDIs by country are the United States, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.