Originally Posted by
fatsopilot
I agree, this has already been documented in Korea:
Malcolm Gladwell on Culture, Cockpit Communication and Plane Crashes - The Middle Seat Terminal - WSJ
Their whole culture is setup in a hierarchal fashion, so much so that the language they speak is part of the problem. In the book he explained how the company forced the pilots to speak English in order to counter the problem inherent in the Korean language. There is only one chapter in the book about aviation but the whole book is an interesting read.
Hilariously completing my inditement of the media's denial of cultural accident causes, WSJ had removed this 5 year old article as people were beginning to comment on it and it's relevance to Asiana 214. Wow. We really do live in the information age.