Sorry, I made a mistake the KAL story is in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers - here is the relevant text:
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." CHAPTER SEVEN OF OUTLIERS - The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes - "CAPTAIN, THE WEATHER RADAR HAS HELPED US A LOT." On the morning of August 5, 1997, the captain of Korean Air flight 801 woke at six. His family would later tell investigators that he went to the gym for an hour, then came home and studied the flight plan for that evening's journey to Guam. He napped and ate lunch. At three in the afternoon, he left for Seoul, departing early enough, his wife said, to continue his preparations at Kimpo International Airport. He had been a pilot with Korean Air for almost four years after coming over from the Korean Air Force. He had eighty-nine hundred hours of flight time, including thirty-two hundred hours of experience in jumbo jets. A few months earlier, he had been given a flight safety award by his airline for successfully handling a jumbo-jet engine failure at low altitude. He was forty-two years old and in excellent health, with the exception of a bout of bronchitis that had been diagnosed ten days before. At seven p.m., the captain, his first officer, and the flight engineer met and collected the trip's paperwork. They would be flying a Boeing 747.the model known in the aviation world as the "classic." The aircraft was in perfect working order. It had once been the Korean presidential plane. Flight 801 departed the gate at ten-thirty in the evening and was airborne twenty minutes later. Takeoff was without incident. Just before one-thirty in the morning, the plane broke out of the clouds, and the flight crew glimpsed lights off in the distance. "Is it Guam?" the flight engineer asked. Then, after a pause, he said, "It's Guam, Guam." The captain chuckled. "Good!" The first officer reported to Air Traffic Control (ATC) that the airplane was "clear of Charlie Bravo [cumulonimbus clouds]" and requested "radar vectors for runway six left." The plane began its descent toward Guam airport. They would make a visual approach, the captain said. He had flown into Guam airport from Kimpo eight times previously, most recently a month ago, and he knew the airport and the surrounding terrain well. The landing gear went down. The flaps were extended ten degrees. At 01:41 and 48 seconds, the captain said, "Wiper on," and the flight engineer turned them on. It was raining. The first officer then said, "Not in sight?" He was looking for the runway. He couldn't see it. One second later, the Ground Proximity Warning System called out in its electronic voice: "Five hundred [feet]." The plane was five hundred feet off the ground. But how could that be if they couldn't see the runway? Two seconds passed. The flight engineer said, "Eh?" in an astonished tone of voice. At 01:42 and 19 seconds, the first officer said, "Let's make a missed approach," meaning, Let's pull up and make a large circle and try the landing again. One second later, the flight engineer said, "Not in sight." The first officer added, "Not in sight, missed approach." At 01:42 and 22 seconds, the flight engineer said again, "Go around." At 01:42 and 23 seconds, the captain repeated, "Go around," but he was slow to pull the plane out of its descent. At 01:42 and 26 seconds, the plane hit the side of Nimitz Hill, a densely vegetated mountain three miles southwest of the airport-$60 million and 212,000 kilograms of steel slamming into rocky ground at one hundred miles per hour. The plane skidded for two thousand feet, severing an oil pipeline and snapping pine trees, before falling into a ravine and bursting into flames. By the time rescue workers reached the crash site, 228 of the 254 people on board were dead. Regards Michael
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