Outliers: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

1. The chapter opens with the story of the crash of Korean Air flight 801. The plane was in good condition. The weather was bad, but not too bad. As the captain and the first officer bring the plane into land, they can’t see the runway. Alarms begin to go off as they get closer and closer to the ground. The flight engineer suggests that the captain pull up and try again. A short while later he suggests this again. This time the captain agrees, but three seconds later the plane slams into the side of a mountain, killing almost everyone aboard.

2. Korean air had a spate of crashes in the 80’s and 90’s that earned them a bad reputation and threatened their continued existence as an airline. Pilots were found by investigators to be under-trained, and the proper safety protocol wasn’t being followed. But, amazingly, Korean air turned itself around. Since 1999, they have a perfect safety record. It is now as safe as any airline in the world. And the reason Korean Air succeeded was because it “acknowledged the importance of its cultural legacy.”

3. Gladwell says that, though plane crashes are often portrayed in movies as the results of a single catastrophic event, in reality they occur because of the accumulation of many small problems. Bad weather, tired pilots, new or unfamiliar airports, crew members who have only recently started to work together—it often takes all of these things to add up to disaster. “The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors.”

4. Suren Ratwatte is a veteran pilot who has studied aircraft disasters. He confirms that the typical crash involves exhausted pilots, poor communication, poor decision-making, and misunderstanding. It is not often bad piloting that causes plane crashes: it is the pilots’ inability to do all of the other things that flying a plane involves: talking, improvising, multitasking, listening.

5. Ratwatte tells the story of a time he had to make an unexpected landing at an unfamiliar airport when one of his passengers fell ill. The plane was full of fuel, and therefore too heavy to land in normal conditions. He had to land against the wind, which meant coming into the airport in the opposite direction than what was usually allowed. He told Air Traffic Control what he needed, he enlisted the help of his entire crew to keep things running smoothly, and put the massive heavy jet on the ground in time to save the ill passenger. This success came about because he stayed calm, communicated himself clearly, and listened to what his inferiors and peers were telling him.

6-8 In contrast, Gladwell provides the transcript from another doomed flight, Avianca 052. The plane has had to divert several times from its planned landing and is running dangerously low on fuel. The pilot repeatedly tells the first officer to tell Air Traffic Control (ATC) at the airport that their fuel levels have become a problem. The first officer tells ATC that the plane is “running out of fuel” but doesn’t use the word “emergency” or even seem very concerned. ATC asks them to divert again, and the first officer agrees. The plane runs out of fuel and crashes shortly after this final communication to ATC. Gladwell dissects the language used. The first officer and the pilot made suggestions and hints, but failed to commandingly tell ATC what the problem was. ATC did not interpret their words correctly and the result was a deadly crash.

9. Ratwatte notes that Air Traffic Control at JFK, the airport at which these pilots were trying to land, is notorious for its bluntness and even rudeness. And they are indeed short with the pilots in their communication. But all the pilots needed to do was tell them they definitively needed to land, which they never did. They deferred to the bitter end.

10. Cross cultural psychologists have found that depending on where we are from, we conform to different rules in our speech and our interpretation. Some countries tolerate ambiguity more than others, some prefer to stick rigorously to rules and procedures. Some countries are called “low power-distance” countries—these are countries where things like rank and authority don’t have a huge effect on communication. Other countries have strict cultural rules regarding how one can speak to a superior, an elder, or even a stranger. These are “high power-distance” countries. It became clear that one way of stopping plane crashes might be to reduce the power-distance in the cockpit. This way first officers would not be afraid to voice a problem or a concern to the captain, and pilots would not defer so readily to ATC if a plane’s safety were at stake. Korea just so happens to be a high power-distance country.

11-12. Gladwell dives back into the Korean Air flight 801 crash with which he began the chapter. He notes that when the first officer makes comments about the weather, he is trying to tell the captain that the weather conditions are dangerous. When he comments on how much he appreciates having weather radar in the cockpit, he means to suggest that the captain take a look at the radar. Korea’s culture is one in which the listener is expected to pick up on subtle cues like this. But the captain was tired, and didn’t hear what his first officer was trying to tell him. This failure of communication caused the plane crash.

13. In 2000, Korean Air brought in experts to help them improve their communication in the cockpit. They began speaking in English, a language that didn’t belong to their culture, and in a sense allowed them to have a different kind of identity when speaking. The pilots could participate in a different cultural legacy, at least when they were in the cockpit.