I wonder what “these types of carriers” means here. I know there are low-cost carriers and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had less-experienced pilots, etc. But to me Emirates strikes me as a well-funded, reputable operation. Does he mean Middle Eastern carriers?
- Prioritizes "face" or "reputation" above literal accuracy
- Has lower-level officials that accept bribes
- Has had airlines and planes for fewer than 5 decades
Assume any complex high-risk engineering system run by that culture will occasionally fail in major ways.
I am expat in south east asia and his comment is correct
low level officials taking bribes means you can do stuff like never wear a seatbelt, just pay the cop $20 USD if you get pulled over. get pulled up for smoking indoors? $20 USD. run over an illegal immigrant and kill them? USD 1000 to have their records completely erased. Sim card? $5 USD cash. rape? what? the police here hung up on my friend on a 911 call because they spoke english and not the 'national language' (police do speak english here).on a different note, it is legal to rape your wife here
low level corruption causes immense problems and injustices in society. here, everyone drink drives. driving a car while extremely drunk here is default behaviour.
ye high level official bribery will cause probelms, but the low level stuff is what completely craters the system and causes the catastrophic failures in complex engineering systems.
You said it better than I could. I am a US citizen, and most of my middle/upper-middle class colleagues simply cannot imagine that their society is the result of many hundreds of thousands of people following totally arbitrary rules, and that if people don't follow those rules their society will collapse. They think that US cops (who for the most part can't be bribed by citizens) are normal, and non-US cops who accept bribes are somehow exotic or abnormal.
> the plane was flying funny because one of the aileron was replaced with electrical tape from dollar store by international airline technician
This is wild speculation, based on second-hand information from your friend, who, given that they referred to it as electrical tape when anyone in the industry would know it's called speed tape and has no similarities with electrical tape, probably doesn't actually know which part of the aircraft is the aileron.
Speed tape on the wing is quite common anywhere in the world on any carrier, and is safe if done properly.
Lion Air and Indonesian aviation has a lot of problems in general, but I doubt this issue was genuinely a safety issue. Your friend probably felt some turbulence on landing.
While I don’t know the specifics here, many people mistake tape on airplanes for normal tape, when it is usually aluminum speed tape[0] that is (in the right scenario) safe to use on airplanes.
It's true enough in western societies that we specifically needed Cockpit Resource Management as a tool to overcome deference to senior officers. A classic example being KLM captain van Zanten from the Tenerife disaster.
I hate that this thread descended into chauvinism and generalized cultural value judgments. The problem of excessive deference to authority plagues all cultures. By not being obsessed about saving face for our own society and acknowledging our own flaws, we make it easier for all of us to learn together.
I omitted that bit because I thought it was the least interesting part of Mark D's comment. The subthread which it has inspired here has reinforced my impression. :(
There was actually lots of additional interesting technical detail from Mark D which I also left out; the part that was germane to the comment I replied to was the bit about the checklists, since that backed up the notion that the Emirates notice was messed up and weird.
The conclusion though, "Don’t fly on these types of carriers", can easily be interpreted as a sociocultural swipe, even if I'm inclined to believe Mark D meant something else and just botched the wording.