Originally Posted by
fgrieu
Originally Posted by
Big Pistons Forever
Bottom line is simple. KAL was a
show and was close to losing access to primary international markets and insurance cover unless they cleaned up their act. The Delta guys came in and pointed out what they needed to do. To KAL’s credit they made some wrenching internal changes and fixed most of the issues. FWIW a friend of mine had first hand knowledge of KAL in the bad old days and almost everything in the report I referenced mirrors what he told me.
PAL and the Pakistani regulators are at a crossroads. They can effect structural change and adopt a modern flight safety culture or they keep on with cosmetic changes that everyone can see through while continuing to crash airplanes. If that is the way they chose to go then they will be a regional only airline going forward.
The "Delta audit".... wasn't. The authors were not qualified as auditors by any international standard, and while interesting reading, it was not an audit comparing policy/procedures/practices against objective observations. The guys were doing the best they could do, they were also ill equipped to do a report.
The situation at KAL in the closing days of 99 was particularly problematic, and the company's CEO, Old Man Cho took the action to make substantive change, and that was a double edge sword. Comment is made on a KAL pilot passing an IR on an aircraft with no engines, I'm not sure of that, but I was involved in looking at sims that were signed off without the staff turning up, which was quite annoying. OTOH, there were also investigations on a number of foreign pilots who turned up at KAL with P-51 time, enough of those to be bloody annoying.
The most competent pilots at KAL included local Koreans, an Ethiopian, and various other groups. Some national groups irritated the locals no end, but they did the same at other airlines.
I'n 9,000 hours there, I had zero, repeat zero MEL that needed to be applied to an aircraft. Occasionally stuff failed, but the aircraft were generally well kept compared to any other airline that we audited.
Much criticism of KAL is deserved at that time, and much is not. Given the scrutiny that the company was under, it acted quite well given the pride of the nationals, a group that are in a continuous state of frozen hostilities with an unpleasant neighbour.
It was not a Korean that blew into Anchorage at 340kts into the circuit, missed the runway by 600' vertically, did a 360 and missed it again. Local crews did some fascinating things with aircraft as well, that kept me busy along with a number of local and foreign crew that were intent on resolving the issues the airline had.
On the death of the Old Man, his son Cho Yung Ho assumed his place at the helm, and he tried to make KAL a center of excellence, it always was from an engineering viewpoint, the problems tended to be related to a rather brutal and pathological management style, which was a hangover of it's recruiting of crew from the defence force. There are many learning points from KAL, CAL, and similar operations, there are many people that have worked to make things better and there were also a number of crews that took the money, bitched and did not engage with the locals to be a productive part of a solution. Having assessed for the company many incidents and accidents, I am not able to support much of the "audit" that was presented to the world as a competent audit, I don't consider it a competent, unbiased objective assessment. The foreign crew could have reasonably have been expected to be statistically lower on incidents than the crew that they were to support. That was not supported as a hypothesis with the incident occurrences that I investigated. There was sufficient incidents tracked by the FOQA system to make such a determination had it been valid... The 80:20 rule existed in all camps, except for one; there was only one Ethiopian, and he was an absolute pleasure to watch operate a 744, every airline he went to he was a blessing.
And while we are watching Putin cause genocide and war crimes, a couple of the Russian pilots were exemplars of Human Factors and CRM application. Almost all of the Russians that were there were a delight to work with, and I wish them fair skies and happiness while they keep their families safe and far away from the depravation of Putin on Russia and the future of their countrymen while this tragedy plays out in Ukraine. Slava Ukraine.
KAL was not for the faint hearted, but it was definitely interesting. damned good engineers in general.