Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety

I live in China, and a couple years ago there were rumors going around among the foreigners in the city I live in that a Chinese airline (I think it was China Southern) was considering moving all of its foreign pilots from Shanghai to this city in order to cut costs.

I have also run into American pilots flying a Thai Airways plane (we were one of the last groups off of the plane, and then we stopped to rearrange who carried what luggage, and crew caught up with us in the hallway).

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.

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.

As for Canada, I don't think Gladwell even mentions Canada in that chapter.

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

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.

Coming only from personal observations, it sure seems like it's an exporter (I'm not sure about how major), but only to certain types of countries - specifically, prosperous non-European ones. Places where those pilots can live decent expatriate lifestyles: think China, Taiwan, Malaysia, UAE, Kuwait, etc. My experience is less varied on developing-world airlines, but I can't recall running into any Western pilots working for Kenya Airways or Royal Air Maroc (the two I have flown most recently).

This makes sense, in some way - no matter what, Kenya Airways is unlikely to attract someone who spent a bunch of their time in Orlando to move to Nairobi, but with the right amount of money I could see those people moving to Shanghai for a few years to get some seniority and time in control of a larger plane than they would have if they had stayed with Continental.

Interestingly, I "see" (hear) very few non-national Captains flying on Western European airlines. My theory is that all those countries have Air Forces of their own, and that their aviation sectors are small enough that they can rely on ex-military pilots for the majority of their piloting needs.