”“They killed my horse.” That’s what my wife remembers of her uncle’s story of the airliner that crashed on his property in January 1990. That’s not callousness, it’s just selective memory. Things plant themselves in your mind and overshadow other things which may be a lot more important. These are planted too, but just a little less firmly than recollection number one. Seventy-three people died in the crash and her uncle turned out and helped all he could with rescue work for the survivors. He remembered things other than just the death of the horse.

Last week I wrote about the things I learned from the current best-selling book "Outliers" treating of the way in which so-called merit selection and high placement of gifted young athletes and students isn't really as objective as it appears to be because the original selection is faulty in its methods which have a carryover effect that gives its beneficiaries a permanent unfair advantage over their competitors. Today I'm dealing with another chapter in the book, which goes from explaining athletic and academic success to explaining airplane non-success, i.e., fatal crashes.

Clarifying what I wrote in my first paragraph, let me tell youse readers that my wife's uncle lived in a place out here called Cove Neck on the North Shore in the shadow of Theodore Roosevelt's old house at Sagamore Hill. In a bigger place across the street lived the McEnroe family, whose best-known member is John McEnroe, the tennis champ. The plane that crashed down on the two establishments was Flight 052 of Avianca Airlines, the Colombian carrier. Outliers says it crashed because Colombia is a country with a high power-distance index for the relations of subordinates and superiors. In other words there is a gap between them and subordinates cross it at their peril.

Deference to superiors is the rule and this extends even to such a temporary superior as an air traffic controller at Kennedy Airport telling the Colombians to go the end of the queue waiting to land in foggy weather. The controller didn't understand the urgency of their report that they were low on fuel -- controllers hear that all the time -- and they were too intimidated to insist that he clear them for immediate landing. So they ran out of fuel and crashed and only one crew member survived along with eighty-four injured passengers. Debris fell everywhere but didn't hit the unlucky horse. He died of a heart attack caused by the fantastic thunder-clap of the plane plunging into the earth.

The "Outliers" chapter that deals with the Avianca crash and several others is called The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes. Colombia isn't the only country where people are afraid to speak up to the boss even if he's found a way to turn an airplane into a submarine. Korean Air, KAL, was much worse. In 1999 they were about to be banned from international airports because of repeated crashes. In 2000 they finally brought in an American, David Greenberg from Delta Airlines, to force their crews to learn English correctly so as to comply with international rules making English compulsory for all air communications. The other part of his job was to indoctrinate them with the idea of teamwork, not submission, as the key to safe flying.

This was essential because Korean society is hierarchal to a degree and crashes had often resulted from failure of first officers in particular to warn pilots of dangers ahead. They were simply afraid to challenge such a high-status character. Unbelievably, Greenberg changed this attitude to a point where KAL "turned itself around" and in 2006 received an international aviation award for safety. It's now considered as safe as any airline in existence.

Psychologists working for the airlines have formulated the power-distance scale as a key to determining which nationalities maintain the greatest separation between superiors and subordinates in their society and which interpose the least distance between the two. The five highest PDI's belong to nations of the Third World which are developing rapidly but haven't yet outgrown the autocratic attitudes of their past. The five least class-conscious ones are first, the USA and right behind, Ireland and three British dominions far removed from the Mother Country. The first class leads in plane crashes, the second doesn't have them.

Again I recommend "Outliers" for people who have any curiosity at all about how the world chugs along in the way it does. I’ve been reviewing here the two most striking chapters I came across. There are others which may be preferred by other readers. One of them claims that success in any field can be predicted from the amount of time put in in learning the technic to be used. 10,000 hours is about right, we’re told. It worked for Bill Gates and for the Beetles and it might work for you if you’re not a pitiful little scrounger afraid to do a day’s work.

Then there’s the chapter about geniuses which discloses that Robert Oppenheimer, who ran the Manhattan Project that built the atom bomb once tried to poison his physics instructor. Above all, Outliers is a book for young parents,who will be in its debt just for the guidance it gives on how to ensure that their children aren’t victimized by school selection systems for sports or studies that fail to recognize that young children shouldn’t be classified by the year they were born in but by the seasons of that year. That information alone makes the book worth its price and more.;