Ricejet: "Having worked in Japan for several years I can tell you that ANA pilots are the worst. Unable to think outside the box, inflexible, lack of common sense, etc. I avoid Japanese carriers all the time. Too many incidents with ANA lately. The 737 upset, the AJX 767 that flew through the thunderstorm on approach to NRT a couple months ago that was hit by lightening, several tailstrikes, all the ANA planes that land during typhoons while all the other carriers divert, and many more. Must be something in their culture."
I don't agree. I have worked with Japanese high tech companies for more than 10 years, and have spent much time in meeting rooms and labs with my Japanese colleagues. While the outcome in terms of development results and delivery performance has always been admirable in the long run, getting there was hard work and sometimes frustrating. I have experienced many instances where the Japanese team had in our eyes simply forgotten all common sense, where the team would happily stampede into the wrong direction, where things were neglected that a second year engineering student would consider basics, where production and quality control procedures were installed that had no fail-safing (poka yoke) whatsoever and no failure mode analyses were carried out.
Reading about nuclear accident investigations in Japan paints a similar picture of inflexibility, group-think, naivite, over-reliance on automation and the inability to imagine that things sometimes do not go as planned.
If these kind of cultural issues were also prevalent in the airline industry, you'd expect planes to be dropping out of the skies like those of some other Asian airlines in the 80s and 90s. But when you look at statistics, Japanese airlines have been really remarkably safe since the early 70s, and even more so after JAL123 where Boeing and JAL maintenance shared the blame. The picture remains the same when you look at glitches that could have ended a lot worse. Admittedly, there were some maintenance issues at JAL a few years ago, and the ANA 737 upset raised and the recent spate of tail scrapes at JAL and ANA raised some eyebrows, but the overall frequency of such glitches does not appear to be higher than in other airlines that have a strong safety culture and excellent track record (CO, DL, BA, LH to name a few).
I don't know what they do differently than the rest of the technical community in Japan, but I'd sure like to know.
Last edited by BRE; 3rd July 2012 at 08:35.