| | The crash of Asiana airliner brings this all into focus.
As the Asiana Airlines Inc. (020560) jet neared Los Angeles International Airport, Captain Vic Hooper told his Korean co-pilot to make a visual approach, meaning he’d manually fly instead of letting automation do the work.
The co-pilot froze, leaving them too high and off course, Hooper said about the incident, which occurred several years ago. Hooper said he had to take over the controls to get the Boeing Co. (BA) 777 back on track.
“I don’t need to know this,” Hooper said the co-pilot told him later, explaining why a maneuver that’s second nature to most U.S. airline pilots rattled him. “We just don’t do this.”
Bloomberg here.
Note, however one my wife's computer friends who was a transport pilot sent her a narrative by a training instructor that seems to be questionable. Having read it - and having some cockpit time myself and having worked for two Japanese companies - nothing in the content seemed extreme or unacceptable prima facie. Nonetheless ...
As questions about Asiana’s training program started to surface, an e-mail written by someone named Tom Brown, claiming to be a former flight simulator instructor who trained Asiana pilots, began circulating online in aviation forums. The e-mail starts out:
After I retired from UAL as a Standards Captain on the – 400, I got a job as a simulator instructor working for Alteon (a Boeing subsidiary) at Asiana. When I first got there, I was shocked and surprised by the lack of basic piloting skills shown by most of the pilots...
Mr. Brown said that South Korean carriers’ poor international safety records had led their employers to bring in foreign pilots to train them. Brown’s message describes a “lack of basic piloting skills” among the South Korean pilots he trained, and says that the foreign instructors were “forced upon [the South Korean carriers] after the amount [sic] of fatal accidents” and faced “ingrained resistance from the Koreans.”
Asiana Airlines had no record of a Tom Brown working for the organization.
The Christian Science Monitor here.
And just to add a little political history to the psycho-epistemology: Sterling Seagrave's The Soong Dynasty is about the three women who actually formed much of China's history in the 20th century. "One loved the people. One loved the nation. One loved money." Soong Mei-ling became Madame Chiang kai-Shek. (Soong Ai-ling married H. H. Kung, the richest man in China. Soong Ching-ling became Madame Sun Yat-sen.) Also, just to say, when I mentioned them to a Chinese graduate student I was working with he recited the same formula, "One loved the people..."
Anyway, so, Chiang Kai-shek was a fascist who sidled up to Mussolini and Hitler. He brought in Italian flight instructors to train his "air force" and lost all five planes in training. The Italians had no problem promoting Chinese pilots from "good families." His wife returned to America where she had been educated, found Claire Chennault, and brought him and his Flying Tigers back to China with her.
... and a footnote... During both World Wars, German pilots tended to come from upper class families, the Junkers and all. They never got their hands dirty. American pilots were just guys. When an American experienced any mechanical problem, he could usually tell the mechanic what the problem was. The German pilots could not.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 7/16, 9:51am)
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