Speaker 1: Picture this. It's just a few days before Christmas nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine.
Speaker 2: A pretty cozy timmy, right, super cozy.
Speaker 1: You're in this quiet little village called Great Hollingbury, just
Speaker 1: north of London, and imagine a man named Gary Dan.
Speaker 1: He's standing in his living room handing out presents to
Speaker 1: his family. The tree is lit, it's a freezing, crystal
Speaker 1: clear winter night outside.
Speaker 2: Sounds perfectly idyllic, it really is.
Speaker 1: But then this sound starts vibrating through the floorboards, just
Speaker 1: a deafening mechanical roar that builds so fast and so
Speaker 1: loud it feels like it's going to tear the chimney
Speaker 1: right off the roof.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, it's that kind of guttural, low frequency sound
Speaker 3: that just bypasses logic, you know, Yeah, it triggers pure
Speaker 3: instinctual panic exactly.
Speaker 1: So Gary runs to the window, presses his face against
Speaker 1: the cold glass, and looks out into the freezing night,
Speaker 1: and what he sees just defies belief. A massive Boeing
Speaker 1: seven forty seven cargo plane is right there, practically skimming
Speaker 1: the tree tops of his neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's banking violently to the left with vieral flames
Speaker 1: shooting out of the engine exhausts. I mean, before his
Speaker 1: brain can even process the impossible physics of a jumbo
Speaker 1: jet in his backyard, it just vanishes behind the tree line.
Speaker 3: Followed immediately by an earth shattering impact that lights up
Speaker 3: the entire horizon.
Speaker 1: Right Gary and his brother run out of their house
Speaker 1: into the pitch black woods, sprinting toward this massive plume
Speaker 1: of smoke. Aviation fuel is just popping and exploding in
Speaker 1: the canopy above them. They push through the brush and
Speaker 1: find themselves standing at the edge.
Speaker 2: Of an abyss just total devastation.
Speaker 1: A crater thirty feet deep and glowing with fires carved
Speaker 1: directly into the English countryside. Wreckage is scattered over half
Speaker 1: a mile. They're shouting into the darkness like hello, can
Speaker 1: anybody hear me? But all they get back is the
Speaker 1: crackle of burning pine.
Speaker 3: That is just chilling, It really is.
Speaker 1: So How does a state of the art seven forty
Speaker 1: seven flown by four highly trained aviation professionals fall out
Speaker 1: of the sky less than sixty seconds after taking off
Speaker 1: from Stanstad Airport? That is our mission in this deep dive.
Speaker 1: When you look at the accident reports, you initially assume
Speaker 1: catastrophic mechanical failure.
Speaker 3: Right, which makes sense.
Speaker 1: But the true cause of Korean Air Cargo Flight eighty
Speaker 1: five h nine was buried in hundreds of years of
Speaker 1: cultural history, military psychology, and a phenomenon that accident investigators
Speaker 1: honestly fear more than engine fires.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the investigation begins right in the dirt of
Speaker 3: that crater. Rescue workers arrived shortly after Gary and the
Speaker 3: grim reality setting quickly. The three crew members and one
Speaker 3: maintenance engineer on board did.
Speaker 1: Not survive, just a horrific outcome.
Speaker 3: It was the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch, the AAIB
Speaker 3: is mobilized immediately, but you know, securing a commercial crash
Speaker 3: site is never as simple as just walking up to
Speaker 3: the wreckage. A safety specialist named Sid Hawkins was dispatched
Speaker 3: to assess the immediate threat because he's.
Speaker 1: Walking into a nightmare scenario.
Speaker 3: Right, Oh, absolutely, Because this wasn't a passenger flight carrying
Speaker 3: you know, suitcases and golf clubs. This seven forty seven
Speaker 3: took off with thirty tons of highly volatile aviation fuel
Speaker 3: and sixty three thousand kilograms of heavy freight.
Speaker 1: That's a massive amount of weight.
Speaker 3: Right, So before investigators could even step foot near that
Speaker 3: thirty foot crater. Hawkins had to decode the cargo manifest,
Speaker 3: and that manifest was deeply alarming.
Speaker 1: What kind of stuff are we talking about here?
Speaker 3: Well, you had two tons of whiskey, which is essentially
Speaker 3: highly flammable ethanol in a crash environment. You had color
Speaker 3: printer cartridges, heavy machinery and X ray machine.
Speaker 1: Okay, hazardous but manageable.
Speaker 3: Sure, But the most terrifying items on the list were
Speaker 3: spools of military detonating cord and the fact that this
Speaker 3: specific older model of the seven forty seven utilized depleted
Speaker 3: uranium as ballanced weights in the tail section.
Speaker 1: Depleted uranium, I mean, that just sounds inherently apocalyptic when
Speaker 1: you combine it with a raging jet fuel fire.
Speaker 3: It does. It's a very heavy metal used as a
Speaker 3: counterweight to keep the plane balanced. But if those weights
Speaker 3: shatter and aerosolize in a high temperature fire, the toxic
Speaker 3: and radioactive risks of the first responders are severe.
Speaker 1: Wow, So what do they do?
Speaker 3: Hawkins had to bring in specialized radiological teams. Fortunately, tests
Speaker 3: quickly showed that the uranium casing had held and the
Speaker 3: detonating cord had either burned off harmlessly or remained intact.
Speaker 1: Okay, So once the site was declared safe, the sun
Speaker 1: comes up, revealing the true scale of the devastation in
Speaker 1: the woods. But the tension wasn't just in the forest.
Speaker 3: Right back at stance at airport, on the very runway,
Speaker 3: flight eight five oh nine had just left, crews were
Speaker 3: dealing with a chilling discovery of their own. The runway
Speaker 3: was completely littered with debris, and.
Speaker 1: In the world of aviation investigation, runway debris usually means
Speaker 1: one specific thing, doesn't it yea.
Speaker 3: It immediately points the finger at an uncontained engine failure.
Speaker 3: You start visualizing a turbine blade snapping inside the enginet
Speaker 3: like one hundred and fifty miles per hour, exploding outward,
Speaker 3: severing hydraulic lines, and tearing the wing apart before the
Speaker 3: plane even clears the airport boundary.
Speaker 1: But this debris field held something deeply disturbing. Amidst all
Speaker 1: the shredded metal and plastic on the tarmac, and investigators
Speaker 1: found an object that looked identically horrifyingly like a human jawbone.
Speaker 3: Which completely upends the initial theory. The thought process immediately
Speaker 3: shifts from mechanical failure to a morbid human element, right like.
Speaker 1: Did a trespasser run onto the runway in the dark
Speaker 1: to commit suicide or did a.
Speaker 3: Ground crew member get sucked into the engine intake instantly
Speaker 3: destroying the turbine and bringing down a three hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty ton aircraft. They actually had to lock downstairstead, shutting
Speaker 3: down all flights right before the Christmas rush just to
Speaker 3: unravel this thread.
Speaker 1: But thankfully daylight brought some relief on that front. Under
Speaker 1: proper lighting, the so called jawbone was identified as just
Speaker 1: a heavily melted, twisted piece of industrial plastic, just.
Speaker 3: A trick of light in the context.
Speaker 1: Exactly so, the debris on the runway wasn't from the
Speaker 1: plane breaking apart during its takeoff role. It was actually
Speaker 1: shrapnel from the massive explosion in the woods, violently adjusted
Speaker 1: high into the atmosphere and blown backward by the winter
Speaker 1: wind onto.
Speaker 3: The airport, which is a crucial piece of the puzzle.
Speaker 3: It prompted the AAIB to execute what's called a four
Speaker 3: corner search in the forest.
Speaker 1: A four corner search.
Speaker 3: Yeah investigators grid out the wreckage, specifically looking for the
Speaker 3: furthest extremities of the aircraft yeah, so the tip of
Speaker 3: left wing, the tip of the right wing, the tailplane,
Speaker 3: and the vertical fin and.
Speaker 1: If they find them all in one spot.
Speaker 3: Finding all four corners in the main impact crater proves
Speaker 3: the aircraft did not suffer a midair structural breakup. It
Speaker 3: was entirely whole the moment.
Speaker 1: It hit the earth Man and the ground marks told
Speaker 1: the rest of the story. There was a long, slender,
Speaker 1: violent gash sliced through the top soil by the left wing,
Speaker 1: immediately followed by the massive main crater from the nose.
Speaker 3: It didn't fall flat right.
Speaker 1: It flew into the ground at over two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty knots in a steep, nearly ninety degree left bank
Speaker 1: pointing down. So if the plane was structurally sound taking
Speaker 1: off normally, did the pilot just decide to fly it
Speaker 1: into the ground.
Speaker 3: That's the deeply unsettling paradox they were staring at. The
Speaker 3: engines were producing thrust. Flight controls were connected. To figure
Speaker 3: out why a highly experienced crew would fly a functional
Speaker 3: airframe into the dirt, they had to dig through the
Speaker 3: pulverized cockpit for the flight instruments.
Speaker 1: Specifically, they were looking for the captain's attitude Director indicator
Speaker 1: or eighty.
Speaker 3: I right exactly when you were flying a heavy jet
Speaker 3: in the pitch black of night, surrounded by heavy cloud cover,
Speaker 3: your eyes will lie to you.
Speaker 1: Because you can't see anything outside.
Speaker 3: Right, without a visual horizon, your inner ear cannot distinguish
Speaker 3: between gravity and the centrifugal forces of a turn. You
Speaker 3: could be banking sixty degrees and feel completely level. The
Speaker 3: EIGHTI is the screen that cuts through human sensory illusion,
Speaker 3: displaying the exact pitch and roll of the aircraft.
Speaker 1: So when forensics pulled the shattered pieces of the Captain's
Speaker 1: EIGHTI from the wreckage, they found something chilling.
Speaker 3: They analyzed the microscopic scratch marks made by the indicator
Speaker 3: needles at the exact millisecond of impact.
Speaker 1: Right, and they realized that while the plane was banking
Speaker 1: ninety degrees into the dirt, the captain's screw was frozen.
Speaker 1: It was displaying perfectly straight level flight.
Speaker 3: And the absolute tragedy of this is this plane had
Speaker 3: a pre existing condition. Wait really yeah, The aircraft had
Speaker 3: arrived in London from Tashkent earlier that afternoon, and the
Speaker 3: previous flight crew experienced that exact same lie on that
Speaker 3: exact same ADI.
Speaker 1: But they landed safely at Stanstead.
Speaker 3: How because they had the advantage of daylight. The previous
Speaker 3: captain initiated a turn, saw his instrument wasn't moving, look
Speaker 3: out the window at the actual physical horizon, realized his
Speaker 3: screen was broken, and simply swapped to reading his backup instruments.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they land. They log the failure in the
Speaker 1: maintenance book, and a Korean air ground engineer traveling with
Speaker 1: the plane gets to work. But he is missing a
Speaker 1: critical document, the fault isolation manual, which is.
Speaker 3: A huge problem. Without that manual, modern aviation maintenance basically
Speaker 3: devolves into dangerous guesswork.
Speaker 1: Right, So he enlists a local British mechanic for assistance.
Speaker 1: They pull the ADI unit out of the dashboard, inspect
Speaker 1: the back and determine that a tiny connector pin looks
Speaker 1: slightly bent. Yeah.
Speaker 3: They replace the pin, plug the unit back in, run
Speaker 3: a quick built in test, and the screen lights up perfectly.
Speaker 3: They sign off on the repair.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about it like this. Imagine your house's
Speaker 1: electrical systems starts violently flickering. You assume the bulb in
Speaker 1: your lamp is bad, so you change it. The new
Speaker 1: bulb turns on and you think, great, problem solved.
Speaker 3: But you're missing the big picture exactly.
Speaker 1: What you don't realize is that the actual issue is
Speaker 1: a massive degrading short circuit down in your basement breaker panel,
Speaker 1: and your house is quietly catching fire behind the drywall.
Speaker 1: They treated the symptom completely missing the disease.
Speaker 3: That is the exact mechanism of this failure. The eighty
Speaker 3: I screen is just a dumb monitor. The actual brain
Speaker 3: generating the data is a device called the inertial navigation
Speaker 3: unit or INU.
Speaker 1: Which is located deep in the avionics bay beneath the
Speaker 1: cockpit floor right.
Speaker 3: It acts like the plane's synthetic inner ear. It uses
Speaker 3: a highly complex array of lasering, gyroscopes and accelerometers to
Speaker 3: track the plane's movement in three dimensional space, totally independent
Speaker 3: of any outside GPS signals.
Speaker 1: But the Captain's I and you had suffered a localized
Speaker 1: internal fault.
Speaker 3: It wasn't dead. Worse, it was actively lying. It was
Speaker 3: continually broadcasting a corrupted zero degrees of roll signal. The
Speaker 3: maintenance crew's pin replacement was entirely useless. When flight eighty
Speaker 3: five O nine was cleared for takeoff to Milan. It
Speaker 3: was a ticking time bomb.
Speaker 1: But commercial planes have redundancies. There is never just one
Speaker 1: instrument in that cockpit. You have the captain screen, the
Speaker 1: first officer's screen on the right, and a completely independent
Speaker 1: Stammi screen in the center console right.
Speaker 3: Even if one screen is stuck, you have three other
Speaker 3: pairs of eyes and a four man.
Speaker 1: Crew, which makes the contents of the cockpit voice recorder
Speaker 1: of the black box so harrowing to listen to. It
Speaker 1: was buried under thirty feet of compacted earth for nearly
Speaker 1: a week. When investigators finally extracted the audio tape, the
Speaker 1: terror wasn't in the sound of panic or screaming.
Speaker 3: The terror was in the absolute clinical silence.
Speaker 1: Let's break down that sixty second flight. It's night. They
Speaker 1: are running over an hour behind schedule, which inherently builds
Speaker 1: psychological pressure. They throttle up, hurtle down the runway, and
Speaker 1: lift off into the darkness, and at.
Speaker 3: Nine hundred feet their departure procedure requires a climbing left turn.
Speaker 1: The moment the wheels leave the ground, a piercing warning
Speaker 1: horn begins blaring in the cockpit.
Speaker 3: It's a specific localized alarm called a comparator warning Its
Speaker 3: sole purpose is to monitor the multiple ion us and
Speaker 3: scream at the pilots if the data disagrees. It is
Speaker 3: an unmistakable audible alert telling the crew, Hey, one of
Speaker 3: your screens is lying to you. Crosscheck your backups immediately.
Speaker 1: The captain starts turning his control column to the left,
Speaker 1: but his primary screen, fed by that corrupted iron ew
Speaker 1: in the belly of the plane, shows them flying level.
Speaker 3: He is suddenly caught in a deadly feedback loop of
Speaker 3: spatial disorientation. He physically turns the wheel, but his eyes
Speaker 3: tell him the plane isn't.
Speaker 1: Responding because the screen is frozen exactly.
Speaker 3: His inner confused by the g forces of the climb
Speaker 3: and the darkness outside can't provide a reliable balance. He
Speaker 3: assumes the heavy aircraft is just being sluggish in the climb,
Speaker 3: so he turns the wheel further to the left.
Speaker 1: The plane rolls to thirty degrees, then sixty degrees, then
Speaker 1: eighty degrees.
Speaker 3: And the aerodynamics of a jet at a ninety degree
Speaker 3: bank are just brutal. An airplane wings lift is generated
Speaker 3: perpendicular to the wing itself. When you bank ninety degrees,
Speaker 3: all of your lift is pointing sideways.
Speaker 2: Parallel to the ground, so you're not going up anymore, right.
Speaker 3: You have zero vertical lift keeping you in the air.
Speaker 3: A three hundred and fifty to seven forty seven effectively
Speaker 3: becomes a heavy metal brick slicing downwards toward the earth.
Speaker 1: Here's the part of this investigation that absolutely mind blows me.
Speaker 1: The captain is unknowingly flying them into a graveyard spiral. Yes,
Speaker 1: but the first officer, sitting three feet to his right,
Speaker 1: has his own independent screen.
Speaker 2: Which is working perfectly exactly.
Speaker 1: His screen is working perfectly. The standby screen in the
Speaker 1: middle is working perfectly. The flow ight engineer, sitting at
Speaker 1: a panel right behind them, clearly sees the standby screen
Speaker 1: showing an extreme bank. The engineer even quietly murmurs, bank's
Speaker 1: not working, and.
Speaker 3: The captain, who is hyper fixated on his frozen screens,
Speaker 3: just ignores the comment.
Speaker 1: But wait, the first officer, with the undeniable visual evidence
Speaker 1: of their impending death right in front of his face,
Speaker 1: does absolutely nothing. I just survival instinct is the most
Speaker 1: fundamental drive in biology. It is you are in a
Speaker 1: steel tube hurtling toward the ground at three hundred miles
Speaker 1: an hour. The first officer knows without a shadow of
Speaker 1: a doubt they are seconds from impact. Why doesn't he
Speaker 1: just reach out, grab his own control column and shout
Speaker 1: I have control.
Speaker 3: Well to answer that, we have to pull back from
Speaker 3: the mechanics of the aircraft and examine the mechanics of
Speaker 3: the human mind. The cause of this crash wasn't wiring.
Speaker 3: It was history.
Speaker 1: Okay, tell me mare.
Speaker 3: We have to look at who was occupying the left seat.
Speaker 3: Captain Park wasn't just a veteran pilot. He was a
Speaker 3: former colonel in the Republic of Career Air.
Speaker 1: Force, OH, a military man accustomed to supreme authority exactly.
Speaker 3: He had spent the bulk of his career flying highly agile,
Speaker 3: single seat fighter jets solo operations. He was not culturally
Speaker 3: or professionally conditioned to operate as part of a multi
Speaker 3: crew commercial environment where decision making is collaborative.
Speaker 2: That makes sense, and the.
Speaker 3: Voice recorder reveals a man who was deeply agitated that night.
Speaker 3: The delays irritated him, and his tone toward his first
Speaker 3: officer was sharply condescending, establishing this immediate atmosphere of intimidation,
Speaker 3: and not to.
Speaker 1: Mention, he was also operating under a cloud of institutional pressure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he had recently received a formal reprimand from the
Speaker 3: airline for botching an instrument departure on a previous flight.
Speaker 3: So he was hyper focused, almost aggressively so on executing
Speaker 3: this specific departure route flawlessly to prove himself.
Speaker 1: So he creates this mental tunnel, focusing all his cognitive
Speaker 1: bandwidth on that one broken screen. But that still doesn't
Speaker 1: explain the first officer's paralysis.
Speaker 3: The first officer's inaction is rooted in something much deeper,
Speaker 3: the societal norms of nineteen ninety South Korea. Sociologists use
Speaker 3: a metric called the power distance index to measure how
Speaker 3: different cultures handle inequality and.
Speaker 2: Authority, and where did they stand.
Speaker 3: At that time. Korean society, and particularly its military influenced
Speaker 3: aviation sector, had an incredibly high power distance. It is
Speaker 3: a culture deeply structured around strict hierarchical respect. You defer
Speaker 3: to your elders, and you absolutely defer to your commanding officers.
Speaker 1: So in that cockpit, they weren't just captain and first officer.
Speaker 3: No, they were a revered senior military colonel and a
Speaker 3: vastly junior subservient apprentice. The first officer was relatively new
Speaker 3: to the seven forty seven. He had a fraction of
Speaker 3: the flying hours. Captain Parkatt, the.
Speaker 1: Psychological ingredient in that room was essentially a cliff.
Speaker 3: Exactly for a junior officer in that specific cultural context,
Speaker 3: pointing out a superior's mistake isn't just rude. It causes
Speaker 3: the superior to lose face, which is a profound social rupture,
Speaker 3: intervening like taking the controls from a former The colonel
Speaker 3: was viewed as an active insubordination so severe that it
Speaker 3: felt conceptually impossible.
Speaker 1: The AAIB analysis put it in a way that is
Speaker 1: hard to shake. They basically said, the first officer was
Speaker 1: so psychologically shackled by military deference and cultural hierarchy that
Speaker 1: he subconsciously feared the dishonor of correcting his commander more
Speaker 1: than he feeled a high speed collision with the Earth.
Speaker 3: It's incredibly tragic, and this cultural phenomenon was actively tearing
Speaker 3: the airline apart. At the time. This crash did not
Speaker 3: happen in a vacuum, right. There was another one, yeah,
Speaker 3: just two and a half years earlier, in August of
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety seven, Korean Air Flight eight oh one flew
Speaker 3: directly into a hillside in Guam, and the circumstances were
Speaker 3: hauntingly identical. Poor visibility, an exhausted captain making a critical
Speaker 3: navigational error, and a junior crew who saw the mistake
Speaker 3: but used highly mitigated indirect language instead of firmly taking
Speaker 3: control of the aircraft.
Speaker 1: And that Guam crash completely decimated the airline's reputation on
Speaker 1: the global stage to airlines suspended their partnership. The US
Speaker 1: Department of Defense actually banned its military personnel from flying
Speaker 1: on koreanair.
Speaker 3: Because the Coctit dynamic was a fatal flaw deeply woven
Speaker 3: into the airline's DNA. They were operating these incredibly complex
Speaker 3: multi crew aircraft as if they were single seat fighters
Speaker 3: piloted by an autocrat with a couple of silent assistants
Speaker 3: in the room.
Speaker 1: So the moment Flight eighty five ZHO nine lifted off
Speaker 1: with a broken eye in you, the cultural silence made
Speaker 1: the crash inevitable.
Speaker 3: Exactly so the first officer sits there watching is perfectly
Speaker 3: functioning artificial horizon roll past sixty degrees, then eighty, then ninety.
Speaker 3: The comparator arm is screaming in the background, the ground
Speaker 3: is rushing up in the darkness, and he.
Speaker 1: Simply lets it happen. Fifty five seconds after takeoff, they
Speaker 1: hit the dirt in Great Hollingbury.
Speaker 3: It is an agonizing reality to confront, but the legacy
Speaker 3: of this crash is defined by what happened next. The
Speaker 3: aviation industry doesn't just catalog its disasters, It weaponizes them
Speaker 3: to force change.
Speaker 1: And the investigators prove this point. Brilliant laate, inn't they
Speaker 1: They took the exact data parameters from the black box,
Speaker 1: the speed, the weight, the severe bank angle, and plugged
Speaker 1: them into a seven forty seven flight simulator.
Speaker 3: Right they wanted to see the exact point of no return.
Speaker 3: They pushed the simulation to the absolute edge, and.
Speaker 1: They found that even at a mere five hundred feet
Speaker 1: above the ground, screaming through the air at two hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty knots, banked at a catastrophic eighty degrees, the
Speaker 1: aircraft was completely recoverable.
Speaker 3: Think about that.
Speaker 1: If the first officer had just forcefully grabbed his control
Speaker 1: column and physically rolled the wings level, they would have
Speaker 1: pulled out of the dive, skimmed the tree tops, and
Speaker 1: flown away into the night. The plane was perfectly willing
Speaker 1: to fly.
Speaker 3: The machine didn't kill them, the hierarchy did. Because of
Speaker 3: this undeniable proof, the AAIB's final report didn't just mandate
Speaker 3: new procedures for fixing in U faults or updating maintenance manuals.
Speaker 3: They demanded a total, radical overhaul of Koreanaire's training philosophy.
Speaker 1: They mandated the aggressive implementation of CRM, yes.
Speaker 3: Crew Resource management. It is the bedrock of modern flight safety.
Speaker 3: CRM is the systematic dismantling of the autocratic cockpit. It
Speaker 3: trains crews to view safety as a collaborative effort.
Speaker 1: It teaches captains how to invite.
Speaker 3: Criticism, and more importantly, it gives junior officers a highly specific,
Speaker 3: standardized vocabulary to challenge authority.
Speaker 1: It replaces a dictatorship with a system of democratic checks
Speaker 1: and balances. Like a first officers trained that if they
Speaker 1: observe a critical safety deviation, they don't hint at it,
Speaker 1: they state the problem.
Speaker 3: Clearly right and if the captain doesn't correct it, they
Speaker 3: state it again forcefully, and if there is.
Speaker 1: Still no response, they are legally empowered and required to
Speaker 1: declare I have control and physically take over the airplane.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and the most incredible part of this tragic story
Speaker 3: is that the transformation actually worked. Korean Air brought in
Speaker 3: outside experts, completely retooled their deeply ingrained corporate culture, and
Speaker 3: ruthlessly implemented CRM, and.
Speaker 1: The results speak for themselves.
Speaker 3: They do. They haven't had a single fatal passenger crash
Speaker 3: since nineteen nine nine. They took an airline that was
Speaker 3: considered an international pariah and rebuilt it into one of
Speaker 3: the safest, most highly rated aviation operations on the planet.
Speaker 1: It remains one of the most successful cultural turnarounds in
Speaker 1: modern corporate history. They prove that you can respect centuries
Speaker 1: of cultural tradition in your personal life, but the moment
Speaker 1: you step into the cockpit, physics and clear communication dictate
Speaker 1: the hierarchy absolutely.
Speaker 3: Which leads all of you listening with a pretty intense
Speaker 3: concept to apply to your own lives. Aviations solved this
Speaker 3: fatal flaw by explicitly forcing junior staff to speak up
Speaker 3: and aggressively training senior leaders to swallow their pride and listen.
Speaker 3: But look at the hierarchies outside of an airplane. Oh,
Speaker 3: they're everywhere, right. Look at a corporate boardroom when a
Speaker 3: toxic merger is being pushed through. Look at a hospital
Speaker 3: operating room when a senior surgeon is rushing a procedure.
Speaker 3: Think about a tense family dynamic where everyone dances around
Speaker 3: a destructive problem to avoid upsetting a patriarch.
Speaker 2: It really makes you think how many preventable.
Speaker 3: Disasters, bankruptcies, medical malpres as, shattered relationships are still happening
Speaker 3: every single day simply because someone in the room is
Speaker 3: too intimidated by the hierarchy to point out that the
Speaker 3: plane is going down. Next time you see a crisis looming,
Speaker 3: whether it's a bad business decision or a literal flashing
Speaker 3: warning light, remember the silence in the cockpit of flight
Speaker 3: eighty five on nine. Don't just sit there exactly, don't
Speaker 3: just watch the horizon until grab the controls.