[quacked]

If the country you're in:

- 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.

[azth]

> - Has lower-level officials that accept bribes

How many countries does that leave? And why only low level, why not also high level? Doesn't that rule out the US as well?

> - Has had airlines and planes for fewer than 5 decades

Also sounds arbitrary.

[throwaway898989]

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.

i am in the country of mh370

[quacked]

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.

[throwaway898989]

my frend catch lionair flight , indonesian borneo to jakarta

the plane acting funny on landing in jakarta, sort of jumping around, weird turbulence

when it land, he look outside and see that one of the major aileron has fuselage completely missing and had been replace with electrical tape

the plane was flying funny because one of the aileron was replaced with electrical tape from dollar store by international airline technician

importantly, if this plane crash, nobody will ever admit this, cctv record deleted, etc. they will just blame beooing

[jhugo]

> 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.

[iancarroll]

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_tape

[Toutouxc]

> see that one of the major aileron has fuselage completely missing

Sorry, but that doesn't mean anything.

[jrochkind1]

I'm gonna say 'Prioritizes "face" or "reputation" above literal accuracy' is definitely the US too.

[quacked]

I concur that there are places where this is true, but not at all to the level that it's true in Asian and African countries

[rectang]

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.