South Korea's aviation industry has made some preventable mistakes in the cockpit and they have made changes to their pilot recruitment, training, and procedures in an attempt to address this. The recent crash at SFO naturally raises the question of relevance to previous crashes and whether or not these changes were sufficient.

Gladwell goes out of his way to refute any racist interpretation here. ("Cultural explanations are sometimes wielded with the same blunt force as genetic explanations—and that is a huge mistake.")