Those pointing the finger at Jakob Van Zanten miss the point.
After Tenerife, KLM went deeply into the circumstances of the accident, realised there was a problem with the martinet attitude of some of its Captains and came up with the prototype of today's CRM, the KHUFAC course.
So how many hull losses has KLM suffered since 1977? Zero.
That course and its successors in no small way account for the continuing improvement in world accident statistics and could be said to have saved many thousands of lives.
Every airline is one flight away from an accident. The only difference between KLM culture now and the Korean airlines seems to be the willingness to admit to the holes in their particular slice of Swiss cheese and fix them.
But the big difference is, after that crash, nobody said "white Europeans have a culture problem, and lack basic airmanship."
They said "this captain made mistakes" and stopped there.
When the Colgan Q400 went down, nobody said the American culture or lack of skills caused it, they said these particular pilots made mistakes, the end.
See the difference? When you start going into race and general "culture" of races is when people should rightly question you.