CAVIEDES: The runway, where is it? I don’t see it. I don’t see it.
They take up the landing gear. The captain tells Klotz to ask for another traffic pattern. Ten seconds pass.
CAVIEDES [SEEMINGLY TO HIMSELF]: We don’t have fuel...
Seventeen seconds pass as the pilots give technical instructions to each other.
CAVIEDES: I don’t know what happened with the runway. I didn’t see it.
KLOTZ: I didn’t see it.
Air Traffic Control comes in and tells them to make a left turn.
CAVIEDES: Tell them we are in an emergency!
Klotz [to ATC]: That’s right to one-eight-zero on the heading and, ah, we’ll try once again. We’re running out of fuel.
Imagine the scene in the cockpit. The plane is dangerously low on fuel. They have just blown their first shot at a landing. They have no idea how much longer the plane is capable of flying. The captain is desperate: “Tell them we are in an emergency!” And what does Klotz say? That’s right to one-eight-zero on the heading and, ah, we’ll try once again. We’re running out of fuel.
To begin with, the phrase “running out of fuel” has no meaning in Air Traffic Control terminology. All planes, as they approach their destination, are by definition running out of fuel. Did Klotz mean that 052 no longer had enough fuel to make it to another, alternative airport? Did he mean that they were beginning to get worried about their fuel? Next, consider the structure of the critical sentence. Klotz begins with a routine acknowledgment of the instructions from ATC and doesn’t mention his concern about fuel until the second half of the sentence. It’s as if he were to say in a restaurant, “Yes, I’ll have some more coffee and, ah, I’m choking on a chicken bone.” How seriously would the waiter take him? The air traffic controller with whom Klotz was speaking testified later that he “just took it as a passing comment.” On stormy nights, air traffic controllers hear pilots talking about running out of fuel all the time. Even the “ah” that Klotz inserts between the two halves of his sentence serves to undercut the importance of what he is saying. According to another of the controllers who handled 052 that night, Klotz spoke “in a very nonchalant manner....There was no urgency in the voice.”
7.
The term used by linguists to describe what Klotz was engaging in in that moment is “mitigated speech,” which refers to any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we’re being polite, or when we’re ashamed or embarrassed, or when we’re being deferential to authority. If you want your boss to do you a favor, you don’t say, “I’ll need this by Monday.” You mitigate. You say, “Don’t bother, if it’s too much trouble, but if you have a chance to look at this over the weekend, that would be wonderful.” In a situation like that, mitigation is entirely appropriate. In other situations, however—like a cockpit on a stormy night—it’s a problem.
The linguists Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu once gave the following hypothetical scenario to a group of captains and first officers and asked them how they would respond:
You notice on the weather radar an area of heavy precipitation 25 miles ahead. [The pilot] is maintaining his present course at Mach .73, even though embedded thunderstorms have been reported in your area and you encounter moderate turbulence. You want to ensure that your aircraft will not penetrate this area.
Question: what do you say to the pilot?
In Fischer’s and Orasanu’s minds, there were at least six ways to try to persuade the pilot to change course and avoid the bad weather, each with a different level of mitigation.
1.Command: “Turn thirty degrees right.” That’s the most direct and explicit way of making a point imaginable. It’s zero mitigation.
2.Crew Obligation Statement: “I think we need to deviate right about now.” Notice the use of “we” and the fact that the request is now much less specific. That’s a little softer.
3.Crew Suggestion: “Let’s go around the weather.” Implicit in that statement is “we’re in this together.”
4.Query: “Which direction would you like to deviate?” That’s even softer than a crew suggestion, because the speaker is conceding that he’s not in charge.
5.Preference: “I think it would be wise to turn left or right.”
6.Hint: “That return at twenty-five miles looks mean.” This is the most mitigated statement of all.
Fischer and Orasanu found that captains overwhelmingly said they would issue a command in that situation: “Turn thirty degrees right.” They were talking to a subordinate. They had no fear of being blunt. The first officers, on the other hand, were talking to their boss, and so they overwhelmingly chose the most mitigated alternative. They hinted.
It’s hard to read Fischer and Orasanu’s study and not be just a little bit alarmed, because a hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse. In the 1982 Air Florida crash outside Washington, DC, the first officer tried three times to tell the captain that the plane had a dangerous amount of ice on its wings. But listen to how he says it. It’s all hints:
FIRST OFFICER: Look how the ice is just hanging on his, ah, back, back there, see that?
Then:
FIRST OFFICER: See all those icicles on the back there and everything?
And then:
FIRST OFFICER: Boy, this is a, this is a losing battle here on trying to de-ice those things, it [gives] you a false feeling of security, that’s all that does.
Finally, as they get clearance for takeoff, the first officer upgrades two notches to a crew suggestion:
FIRST OFFICER: Let’s check those [wing] tops again, since we’ve been setting here awhile.
CAPTAIN: I think we get to go here in a minute.
The last thing the first officer says to the captain, just before the plane plunges into the Potomac River, is not a hint, a suggestion, or a command. It’s a simple statement of fact—and this time the captain agrees with him.
FIRST OFFICER: Larry, we’re going down, Larry.
CAPTAIN: I know it.
Mitigation explains one of the great anomalies of plane crashes. In commercial airlines, captains and first officers split the flying duties equally. But historically, crashes have been far more likely to happen when the captain is in the “flying seat.” At first that seems to make no sense, since the captain is almost always the pilot with the most experience. But think about the Air Florida crash. If the first officer had been the captain, would he have hinted three times? No, he would have commanded—and the plane wouldn’t have crashed. Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up.
Combating mitigation has become one of the great crusades in commercial aviation in the past fifteen years. Every major airline now has what is called “Crew Resource Management” training, which is designed to teach junior crew members how to communicate clearly and assertively. For example, many airlines teach a standardized procedure for copilots to challenge the pilot if he or she thinks something has gone terribly awry. (“Captain, I’m concerned about...” Then, “Captain, I’m uncomfortable with...” And if the captain still doesn’t respond, “Captain, I believe the situation is unsafe.” And if that fails, the first officer is required to take over the airplane.) Aviation experts will tell you that it is the success of this war on mitigation as much as anything else that accounts for the extraordinary decline in airline accidents in recent years.
“On a very simple level, one of the things we insist upon at my airline is that the first officer and the captain call each other by their first names,” Ratwatte said. “We think that helps. It’s just harder to say, ‘Captain, you’re doing something wrong,’ than to use a name.” Ratwatte took mitigation very seriously. You couldn’t be a student of the Avianca crash and not feel that way. He went on: “One thing I personally try to do is, I try to put myself a little down. I say to my copilots, ‘I don’t fly very often. Three or four times a mo
nth. You fly a lot more. If you see me doing something stupid, it’s because I don’t fly very often. So tell me. Help me out.’ Hopefully, that helps them speak up.”
8.
Back to the cockpit of Avianca 052. The plane is now turning away from Kennedy, after the aborted first attempt at landing. Klotz has just been on the radio with ATC, trying to figure out when they can try to land again. Caviedes turns to him.
CAVIEDES: What did he say?
KLOTZ: I already advise him that we are going to attempt again because we now we can’t...”
Four seconds of silence pass.
CAVIEDES: Advise him we are in emergency.
Four more seconds of silence pass. The captain tries again.
CAVIEDES: Did you tell him?
KLOTZ: Yes, sir. I already advise him.
Klotz starts talking to ATC—going over routine details.
KLOTZ: One-five-zero maintaining two thousand Avianca zero--five-two heavy.
The captain is clearly at the edge of panic.
CAVIEDES: Advise him we don’t have fuel.
Klotz gets back on the radio with ATC.
KLOTZ: Climb and maintain three thousand and, ah, we’re running out of fuel, sir.
There it is again. No mention of the magic word “emergency,” which is what air traffic controllers are trained to listen for. Just “running out of fuel, sir” at the end of a sentence, preceded by the mitigating “ah.” If you’re counting errors, the Avianca crew is now in double digits.
CAVIEDES: Did you already advise that we don’t have fuel?
KLOTZ: Yes, sir. I already advise him...
CAVIEDES: Bueno.
If it were not the prelude to a tragedy, their back-and-forth would resemble an Abbott and Costello comedy routine.
A little over a minute passes.
ATC: And Avianca zero-five-two heavy, ah, I’m gonna bring you about fifteen miles northeast and then turn you back onto the approach. Is that okay with you and your fuel?
KLOTZ: I guess so. Thank you very much.
I guess so. Thank you very much. They are about to crash! One of the flight attendants enters the cockpit to find out how serious the situation is. The flight engineer points to the empty fuel gauge, and makes a throat-cutting gesture with his finger.* But he says nothing. Nor does anyone else for the next five minutes. There’s radio chatter and routine business, and then the flight engineer cries out, “Flameout on engine number four!”
Caviedes says, “Show me the runway,” but the runway is sixteen miles away.
-Thirty-six seconds of silence pass. The plane’s air traffic controller calls out one last time.
ATC: You have, ah, you have enough fuel to make it to the airport?
The transcript ends.
9.
“The thing you have to understand about that crash,” Ratwatte said, “is that New York air traffic controllers are famous for being rude, aggressive, and bullying. They are also very good. They handle a phenomenal amount of traffic in a very constrained environment. There is a famous story about a pilot who got lost trafficking around JFK. You have no idea how easy that is to do at JFK once you’re on the ground. It’s a maze. Anyway, a female controller got mad at him, and said, ‘Stop. Don’t do anything. Do not talk to me until I talk to you.’ And she just left him there. Finally the pilot picks up the microphone and says, ‘Madam. Was I married to you in a former life?’
“They are unbelievable. The way they look at it, it’s ‘I’m in control. Shut up and do what I say.’ They will snap at you. And if you don’t like what they tell you to do, you have to snap back. And then they’ll say, ‘All right, then.’ But if you don’t, they’ll railroad you. I remember a British Airways flight was going into New York. They were being stuffed around by New York Air Traffic Control. The British pilots said, ‘You people should go to Heathrow and learn how to control an airplane.’ It’s all in the spirit. If you are not used to that sort of give-and-take, New York ATC can be very, very intimidating. And those Avianca guys were just intimidated by the rapid fire.”
It is impossible to imagine Ratwatte not making his case to Kennedy ATC—not because he is obnoxious or pushy or has an enormous ego, but because he sees the world differently. If he needed help in the cockpit, he would wake up the second crew. If he thought Moscow was wrong, well, he would just go to Helsinki, and if Helsinki was going to bring him in with the wind, well, he was going to talk them into bringing him in against the wind. That morning, when they were leaving Helsinki, he had lined up the plane on the wrong runway—and his first officer had quickly pointed out the error. The memory made Ratwatte laugh. “Masa is Swiss. He was very happy to correct me. He was giving me shit the whole way back.”
Ratwatte continued: “All the guys had to do was tell the controller, ‘We don’t have the fuel to comply with what you are trying to do.’ All they had to do was say, ‘We can’t do that. We have to land in the next ten minutes.’ They weren’t able to put that across to the controller.”
It was at this point that Ratwatte began to speak carefully, because he was about to make the kind of cultural generalization that often leaves us uncomfortable. But what happened with Avianca was just so strange—so seemingly inexplicable—that it demanded a more complete explanation than simply that Klotz was incompetent and the captain was tired. There was something more profound—more structural—going on in that cockpit. What if there was something about the pilots’ being Colombian that led to that crash? “Look, no American pilot would put up with that. That’s the thing,” Ratwatte said. “They would say, ‘Listen, buddy. I have to land.’”
10.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede was working for the human resources department of IBM’s European headquarters. Hofstede’s job was to travel the globe and interview employees, asking about such things as how people solved problems and how they worked together and what their attitudes were to authority. The questionnaires were long and involved, and over time Hofstede was able to develop an enormous database for analyzing the ways in which cultures differ from one another. Today “Hofstede’s Dimensions” are among the most widely used paradigms in crosscultural psychology.
Hofstede argued, for example, that cultures can be usefully distinguished according to how much they expect individuals to look after themselves. He called that measurement the “individualism-collectivism scale.” The country that scores highest on the individualism end of that scale is the United States. Not surprisingly, the United States is also the only industrialized country in the world that does not provide its citizens with universal health care. At the opposite end of the scale is Guatemala.
Another of Hofstede’s dimensions is “uncertainty avoidance.” How well does a culture tolerate ambiguity? Here are the top five “uncertainty avoidance” countries, according to Hofstede’s database—that is, the countries most reliant on rules and plans and most likely to stick to procedure regardless of circumstances:
1.Greece
2.Portugal
3.Guatemala
4.Uruguay
5.Belgium
The bottom five—that is, the cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity—are:
49.Hong Kong
50.Sweden
51.Denmark
52.Jamaica
53.Singapore
It is important to note that Hofstede wasn’t suggesting that there was a right place or a wrong place to be on any one of these scales. Nor was he saying that a culture’s position on one of his dimensions was an ironclad predictor of how someone from that country behaves: it’s not impossible, for example, for someone from Guatemala to be highly individualistic.
What he was saying, instead, was something very similar to what Nisbett and Cohen argued after their hallway studies at the University of Michigan. Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community w
e grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.
Belgium and Denmark are only an hour or so apart by airplane, for example. Danes look a lot like Belgians, and if you were dropped on a street corner in Copenhagen, you wouldn’t find it all that different from a street corner in Brussels. But when it comes to uncertainty avoidance, the two nations could not be further apart. In fact, Danes have more in common with Jamaicans when it comes to tolerating ambiguity than they do with some of their European peers. Denmark and Belgium may share in a kind of broad European liberal-democratic tradition, but they have different histories, different political structures, different religious traditions, and different languages and food and architecture and literature—going back hundreds and hundreds of years. And the sum total of all those differences is that in certain kinds of situations that require dealing with risk and uncertainty, Danes tend to react in a very different way from Belgians.
Of all of Hofstede’s Dimensions, though, perhaps the most interesting is what he called the “Power Distance Index” (PDI). Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority. To measure it, Hofstede asked questions like “How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?” To what extent do the “less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally?” How much are older people respected and feared? Are power holders entitled to special privileges?
“In low–power distance index countries,” Hofstede wrote in his classic text Culture’s Consequences:
power is something of which power holders are almost ashamed and they will try to underplay. I once heard a Swedish (low PDI) university official state that in order to exercise power he tried not to look powerful. Leaders may enhance their informal status by renouncing formal symbols. In (low PDI) Austria, Prime Minister Bruno Kreisky was known to sometimes take the streetcar to work. In 1974, I actually saw the Dutch (low PDI) prime minister, Joop den Uyl, on vacation with his motor home at a camping site in Portugal. Such behavior of the powerful would be very unlikely in high-PDI Belgium or France.*
Outliers Page 15
