Yin Lu was on hand to see bestselling author and frequent New Yorker contributor Malcolm Gladwell speak at this weekend’s New Yorker Festival. Here’s what she had to say about the event.

It is January 25, 1990. An airplane, flight 052 from Colombia’s Avianca airline, is approaching John F. Kennedy International Airport. However, dense fog and high winds from a nor’easter are delaying traffic. The plane is put on three holding patterns for a total of 1 hour and 17 minutes. When it is finally cleared for landing, it makes a wide circle around Long Island because of wind shear. But the autopilot is not functioning, and suddenly the engines go out, one after the other. The plane, 13 miles away from the airport, stops working. It slams into the backyard of an estate at Oyster Bay, killing 73 passengers.

What was the cause of this horrific accident? Was it the inclement weather? A mechanical failure? The air traffic control? Improper maintenance?

According to Malcolm Gladwell in his talk at the New Yorker Festival on Saturday, October 4th – aptly entitled “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes” – the answer is none of the above. There was nothing wrong with the plane, the airport, or the air traffic control. Although the weather was atrocious, it was not the main cause of the crash. Even the official reason for the crash, “fuel exhaustion,” was not the main cause. So what was it?

Contrary to popular belief, most aviation accidents occur for subtle reasons. They are the result of an accumulation of small events, or errors (there are usually seven). Certain preconditions increase the likelihood of these events, the most common of which include poor weather, running behind schedule, the pilot being awake for over 12 hours (in 52% of all cases), and the pilot and copilot having never flown together before (in half of all cases). The errors themselves, however, are not caused by a lack of knowledge or flying skill, but by poor teamwork or miscommunication.

And it is for this reason that Gladwell proclaimed, “Plane crashes are not technical malfunctions. They are social problems.”

The above example was the case-study Gladwell used in his newest book, Outliers: The Story of Success (release date: November 18th). It explains “where successful people come from” by examining cultural, generational, and family influences, especially on how well one does his or her job (e.g., flying a plane). In the aviation industry, the ability to communicate is absolutely indispensable. And “communication” not only involves talking – it also involves being able to calm and persuade people, to reassure them that everything will be all right.

Gladwell illustrated the importance of this ability with another example: a pilot who had to land a heavy airbus that was destined for New York in Helsinki, because there was an emergency on board – one of his passengers had a stroke. The airbus was 60 tons heavier than it should be in order to land at the Helsinki airport, but there was no other option. The pilot, who was educated in British and U.S. institutions, had to convince his superiors to let him land, talk to doctors, talk to passengers, and talk to administrators at Helsinki. He did not stop talking for an entire 40 minutes, but ultimately was able to secure a safe landing.

Why is it important to note that the pilot was educated in Britain and the U.S.? Because these countries have low amounts of “power distance” – a term that basically refers to how hierarchical a culture is. More hierarchy increases power distance. And greater power distance is strongly correlated with larger numbers of plane crashes, because of the cultural phenomenon of “mitigated speech.”

“Mitigated speech” is mainly used by people who are addressing their superiors. It is the sugar-coating, softening, and couching of words – or, in most cases, the truth. This may be effective in certain situations (e.g., when you are convincing your boss to give you a pay raise), but it is disastrous in the aviation industry. According to Gladwell, “mitigation explains one of the greatest puzzles of plane crashes.” This is because it obstructs communication between the copilot and the pilot, or between the copilot and the air traffic controllers, during an emergency situation.

And mitigated speech was precisely the cause of the Avianca 052 accident. The Colombian copilot was, in Gladwell’s words, “culturally conditioned to defer to his pilot.” (Colombia happens to be the country with the greatest power distance, and hence the greatest number of plane crashes.) More importantly, he also could not convey to the air traffic controllers that there was an emergency. Instead of directly stating that there was an emergency, he told them that they were “running out of fuel” – which is meaningless in aviation terminology because all planes are always running out of fuel! When the air traffic controllers asked him if they needed more fuel, he said “I guess so. Thank you very much.” Then he told the pilot that he thought the air traffic controllers were angry at him, because he had offended them somehow.

That was when the engines lost their power and the plane crashed.

Thankfully, airlines have taken measures to combat mitigation. The titles of “captain” and “first officer” have been removed and replaced by “flying” and “non-flying” pilots to eliminate hierarchy. Furthermore, in many airlines the first officer is put behind the wheel during an emergency situation. Plane crashes are more likely when the captain is flying because the subordinate has to moderate the circumstances and communicate to air traffic control.

Moreover, the correlation between power distance and the number of plane crashes is not unalterable. “Our cultural legacies, as powerful as they are, are not written in stone,” Gladwell said. “We can get people to think in a different way at least for the task at hand.” Korea’s airline industry, for instance, has considerably reduced its number of accidents in a mere 10 years, by reengineering the cultural instincts of the pilots and enabling them to “think like a low power distance person in the cockpit.”

Gladwell’s talk was witty, engaging, and highly informative. The next time you step onto a plane, listen carefully to the accent and the name of the pilot at the beginning of the flight. There is a high chance that he or she will be from Australia – one of the lowest power distance countries in the world.
–Yin Lu