Originally Posted by
aterpster
Alas, I am not at all surprised. I worked on the KAL 801 accident at Guam. In three days of NTSB hearings in HNL, I got a good look at the senior management of KAL.
After a rather disastrous decade of the 1990s, Korean had a massive shakeup around the year 2000 - including bringing in more western expat pilots and teaching proper CRM. I was heavily involved in a KAL incident investigation about 10 years ago, when they had a very serious malfunction of a PW4000 engine on a 747-400F (a failure that wasn't supposed to be able to happen). I also got a good look at the management and saw little that I considered objectionable - either by KAL or by the ARAIB (the Korean investigative board). While the KAL maintenance people did miss some warning signs leading up the incident, they followed the Maintenance Manual and Fault Isolation Manual instructions - it would have taken some pretty intimate system knowledge to have connected the dots as to what was really happening. The KAL people were particularly interested in if the flight crew had done anything wrong (they hadn't - everything they did was per the book).
In short, the KAL of today is only distantly related to the KAL of the 1980s and 1990s. While I'm not prepared to call BS on the story, I strongly suspect that the story has been greatly distorted in the telling.