On Sunday, brilliant Fox ?News host Anna Kooiman speculated that the metric system could be to blame for the disappearance of?AirAsia flight?QZ8501, which vanished from radar early Sunday morning with 162 passengers on board. The plane approached violent weather over the Jave Sea 40 minutes into the two-hour flight between the Indonesian city of Surabaya and Singapore.
Raw Story reports:
During breaking coverage of missing Flight QZ8501, Kooiman asked former FAA spokesperson Scott Brenner if the ?real reason? the plane had disappeared was because of the ?different way other countries train their pilots.?
But Kooiman has a good reason to feel that the metric system is to blame. She doesn’t know the difference between kilometers and miles and assumes that everyone else in the world is a stupid as she is.
?Even when we think about temperature, it’s Fahrenheit or Celsius,? she pointed out. ?It’s kilometers or miles. You know, everything about their training could be similar, but different.?
Brenner?patiently debunked Kooiman’s sound theory, however, and pointed out that the?major difference between international pilots and U.S. pilots is the reliance on automatic pilot.
?And a lot of that? is because a lot of crashes are due to pilot error,? he explained. ?So, if you try and eliminate any potential risk, you try and eliminate the pilot’s ability to make incorrect inputs into the aircraft.?
Still confused, the Fox blonde (do we really need to even remember all their names?) pressed for clarity.
?It’s not just a difference in the way that we measure things?? Kooiman replied. ?Is it not as safe in that part of the world? Because our viewers may be thinking, ?International travel, is it safe? Is it not safe???
Brenner soldiered on.
?It’s incredibly safe,? he explained. ?It’s the safest mode of travel you can have. But just on training, I believe our U.S. pilots are very well trained? They also actually fly the aircraft when they’re in the cockpit versus, a lot of times as soon as those wheels are up, a lot of times folks are required, foreign pilots are required to hit that autopilot almost until wheels come back down again.?
Co-host Charles Payne added this about international airplane crashes.
“What about cultural aspects? Certain respects for procedure, not the cowboy attitude, I’m not going to wait for someone to tell me to move out of the way.”
Don’t be dismissive of Payne, however. Calling it the “cowboy attitude makes him sound dumb, but there is actually some solid research and science that backs up what he’s saying. It comes down to — believe it or not — privilege.
I’ve read Malcolm Gladewell’s Outliers?and the problem of the Power Distance Index historically comes into play in cockpits. From Cultural Front:
[Power Distance Index] a measuring system ?concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority? ? as a crucial issue for understanding why, for example, pilots from some nations may have been at a cultural disadvantage for effective and essential communication in an airplane cockpit.
Here is a video of Gladwell discussing this problem?and a National Geographic article that does a solid job of addressing it. Black box recordings of the conversations that occurred between pilots right before crashes support Gladwell’s research.
At any rate, Asian airlines have long addressed the Power Distance issue in official ways, so it’s likely that this plane crashed for no other reason except that it encountered unusually bad weather. It’s certainly not the fault of the pilot’s using the metric system.
Watch the video below.
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Tiffany Willis is a fifth-generation Texan and the founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal America. An unapologetic member of the Christian Left, she has spent most of her career actively working with ?the least of these? and disadvantaged and oppressed populations. She’s passionate about their struggles. To stay on top of topics she discusses,?like her?Facebook page,?follow her on Twitter, or?connect with her via LinkedIn. She also has?a?grossly neglected personal blog?and a?literary quotes blog that is a labor of love. Find her somewhere and join the discussion.
