Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety

I just read <i>Outliers</i> yesterday, conveniently enough, so the chapter is fresh on my mind. While Greenspun certainly refutes <i>a</i> thesis quite effectively, I don't think it's actually the thesis of the chapter he's discussing.<p>First of all, Gladwell does not at any point claim that American or Canadian pilots are "the best" due to the power distance index--in fact, he doesn't claim that at all. If you look at the book, the U.S. has the fifth-lowest index (lower being "better" for these purposes), behind New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Ireland, and he never says anything in the chapter that even implies that American pilots are best.<p>Nor does he say anywhere that the power distance index is the primary cause of plane crashes. Indeed, he explicitly says that any accident is caused by 6-7 small mistakes building on one another without being caught--something that could quite possibly be caused by inexperience, as Greenspun notes--but which can be exacerbated by two people in the cockpit unable to communicate in a direct way.<p>So while I think the article is a useful and interesting theory about differences in rates of crashes (though it should be noted that U.S. airlines do not have an overwhelmingly better safety record than, say, major European ones [1]), it is ultimately another in a series of "hey, let me overgeneralize what Malcolm Gladwell is saying and back it up with minor factual gaffes I found in the book" articles.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm</a>

The misrepresentations in the first paragraph show that the writer's primary objective was to bash Gladwell and he doesn't seem to care much about the facts.<p>To say "Gladwell comes to the conclusion that foreigners are unsafe because they are ... foreign." and "If only everyone were American or Canadian, the world would be a better and safer place." is absurd.<p>It is true that Gladwell talked about low power-distance-index (PIDI) cultures and how pilots from low-PDI cultures were likely to act differently from pilots from high-PDI cultures. However, he didn't say that American pilots were superior to "foreigners". On the contrary, Gladwell mentions a study showing that countries like Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa etc. had a lower PDI than the US. He also mentioned a study showing that Jamaica, Singapore, Sweden, Denmark etc. cultures were better able to tolerate/manage ambiguity than America.<p>As for Canada, I don't think Gladwell even mentions Canada in that chapter.<p>It is funny that the guy should have written a whole post to attack Gladwell and started the post with a blatant misrepresentation of what Gladwell wrote

Though the overall point may be correct, it weakens philg's argument to claim that a non-US pilot may become "Captain at Major Airline" after just 20 hours of pilot-in-command time: that's just not true for any jurisdiction I'm aware of (the article claims it's "typical"), and I'd love to know of even <i>one</i> such case. (I'm an occasional pilot, with both US and "foreign" licenses.)

It's a bit hard to believe that training programs can be split into US and foreign. There are many countries in the second category and it's very probable that most of them have their own requirements. I'm not an expert, I may be wrong. But every sentence comparing country X to "the rest of the world" activates my BS detector.<p>And this "Unless the country is very large, there won't be any regional airlines." seems silly. I haven't heard of any European country with no regional airline. Even Iceland has their own with only 2 "real cities".<p>There's a lot of hand-waving in the post. I'd really like to stick some [citation needed] in there.

Gladwell's books are not scholarly research. They're more like hipster coffee shop conversations, and should be taken with a healthy dose of rigorous skepticism, even though they are usually quite enjoyable.

For this point:<p><i>A typical 16-hour day...nowhere for the pilot to rest. He or she will be sitting near a gate, in uniform...trying to shut out the noise of thousands of passengers walking by and hundreds of public address announcements.</i><p>It seems like a quick-and-easy solution would be to have the Pilots' union demand access to the airline's network lounges (or better yet, make it an FAA requirement so that they can get into off-brand lounges at smaller airports) in their next collective agreement. Union members would commit to not taking advantage of the free food or the computer terminals, and the airlines would in exchange let them hang out there as it's quieter and gives them somewhere to get a bit restful before their next leg.<p>And if the airlines don't want to fill up their own lounges with free staff (as opposed to passengers), contract out the problem - give the pilots PriorityPass memberships, so they'd be going into lounges that aren't their own, and that are explicitly OK with people paying to get in.

It is interesting that in the past, Gladwell has talked about how it takes 10,000 hours of real effort for someone to get effortlessly good at something. Here Greenspun is talking the same point.

While I find Gladwell's writing stimulating, the man quotes Wkipedia as his source multiple times. How a New Yorker writer could get away with it, I don't know.<p>I think Outliers boils down to "if you have the lucky background at the right time and the right place, you will be given more and bigger opportunities." The rest is simply interesting anectdotes.

<a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p>"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

Not having read Outliers, I can't really comment on the argument presented here. However, I found it rather... odd?... that he chose Martha's Vinyard as his example destination for a private pilot, who would need to "check the weather, ..., and decide whether the risks are a reasonable match for his or her skills and equipment", considering that there was a very famous plane crash under similar circumstances, of which I'm sure Greenspun is aware. It struck me in an odd way - I guess it just seems a bit callous to throw in such a veiled reference in an article about airliner crashes.

Am I crazy to think that cutting the world in "US" and "the rest" is profoundly dumb?<p>I mean, putting in the same bag Benin, China and Germany? did anybody loose his mind?

You don't need to exaggerate the article by calling it a 'debunking,' it posits another theory and lays out some facts. It's very even-handed and a good read.