Lessons in error prevention from aviation - good and bad
I'm an emergency physician. I'm not a pilot.
Over the past several years in my profession, we have been looking to aviation for lessons about error prevention. This has been enormously valuable for us; we practice more safely now because of the things we have learned from pilots and other aviation professionals.
That's the good.
Although we in emergency medicine (and medicine generally) owe a great debt to pilots for their leadership in understanding how to make things safer, we have in my experience avoided - entirely - the racism that riddles this thread.
Yes, I know it's just a few posters, but I can't ever recall any post-mortem discussions of physician error - on anonymous online fora or otherwise - that explicitly cited the race or national origin of the doctor who screwed up as a contributing factor for the screw-up. Training systems, yes; amount of experience, yes; even "culture" in a practice environment, yes; but *race* of the doctor? Never.
If there really are a significant number of pilots who seriously think that Korean pilots as Koreans were more likely to make the errors it appears these pilots made, that's profoundly disappointing.