by insomniasexx

What’s more, there is always a minimum of two pilots in the cockpit, a captain and a first officer—the latter is referred to colloquially as the "co-pilot." Both are fully qualified to operate the aircraft, and they share flying duties; first officers perform just as many takeoffs and landings as captains do. It’s not yet clear which Asiana pilot was physically at the controls, the captain or first officer. In any case, either pilot would have been in a position to note and correct for deviations, or to execute a go-around maneuver. Why this didn't happen we don't know.

I read a book a while back. I cannot remember the name of the life of me. But it was all about emergency situations like 9/11 and numerous other flight crashes and how people react in situations.

One point the book made that was intriguing was the differences in Asian cultures had a direct effect on how pilot and co-pilot handled situations. Situations just like this one where something was going wrong, something should have been, but nothing was - or it was done too late. I should really just find the book and excerpt the quote but basically: the hierarchy and respect for elders that is engrained in Asian cultures moreso than western ones leads co-pilots to not speak up in these situations until it is too late. And when they do they phrase things differently like "are you sure we shouldn't do x" rather than "we should do x now."

It will be interesting to see how this will play out in the end and if this cultural difference had any effect in this situation. IIRC, the crashes studied were many years ago and pilot training has added things to address these issues in the cockpit.

Edit: alright so I'm either combining books or mixing them up. But Tipping Point by Gladwell will do: http://www.slashdocs.com/ixizp/the-ethnic-theory-of-plane-cr...

It's interesting.