> Despite the lack of time, Moody made an announcement to the passengers that has been described as "a masterpiece of understatement":
> > Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.
I once read something by... someone... EM Forster, maybe? About how a key difference between the British and the French is that, in an emergency, the French may handle it capably enough but will be freaking out the whole time—then carry on like it never happened; while the British will be cool as a cucumber and act like a life-and-death emergency is a minor inconvenience as they handle it, but then never shut up about it for the rest of their lives.
[EDIT] I wanna say the example was a mishap on a ride somewhere, and he wrote something to the effect of "by the time they get where they're going, the French will have forgotten all about it, while the English will only have just begun what will become an excited, endless retelling of the tale". Except I'm sure he worded it better. Fairly sure it was Forster. Somewhere in his (extensive) essays and articles, I think.
Cultural factors are given significant weight in air accident investigation and safety. For instance, the Korean Air disaster was put down to a cultural subservience to authority.
the Korean Air disaster was put down to a cultural subservience to authority
Here's my anecdote. My mother was born in Korea. At one point, she literally told me that it doesn't matter if I you are right, your duty to your elders comes first. (EDIT: I think it bears saying: A huge number of family arguments in Korean-American families have something to do with parents ruining their credibility with intelligent children by saying such things.)
Air safety is important enough to be given a woke pass!
Fidelity to objective truth is far too important and fundamental to ever be compromised on. In fact, I would go so far to say, that "compromises" on fidelity to objective truth are a red flag, that some form of power corruption is going on.
Another form of corruption, is a claim to be the ultimate or sole arbiter of truth. No being who is subject to the Laws of Thermodynamics and Landauer's Limit should be able to claim they should be treated as effectively omniscient.
No one is inherently right. The best we can do, is to always strive to be less wrong.
The British culture contains NO MORE stoicism, "manhood", "stiff upper lip" or whatever you would call it than any other culture. Saying such stems from imperialism
That's right, every single culture ever has been exactly the same, with exactly the same traits and emotions distributed in equal proportions across the entire population.
Forster was British and was poking fun at his own national character (if it wasn't him it was... Maugham, I suppose? Definitely British). You'll note how it's not really clear they come of better-seeming, overall, and the "punch line" amounts to a complaint about the British. [EDIT: and, go figure, another common characterization of the British is that their humor is often this sort of thing]
And there's usually something to those stereotypes, even if assuming they're true of everyone is plainly not a great idea.
I was on a flight and after a rough turbulent half hour after take off, the English captain announced a technical issue that meant we must return to the airport.
The plane had been acting bizarrely it bounced very hard on take off and then did not gain much altitude for the duration.
There was another rough half an hour back to land in a terrible cross wind.
Then a few moments on the tarmac before it was announced that it was because additional checks were required and the plane was running entirely fine. A bird strike meant they had to return as a precaution.
I'd take the clear and transparent understatement over what I can only assume is a corporate line which covers things from entirely not worth mentioning and we're about to crash and burn.
> When a stereotypical airplane (or spaceship) pilot speaks over the radio, either to flight controllers on the ground or to his own passengers, he does so in a very soft, smooth register, just barely loud enough to pick up on the radio, probably with a faint American Southern accent (unless he's British, in which case it is an upper-class one). He uses radio jargon, even when he doesn't really need to. A true Danger Deadpan never loses his cool or changes his tone of voice under any circumstances whatsoever, a habit which is often Played for Laughs. ...
> In Real Life, this makes a lot of sense. Even if your plane's lost two engines and half a wing, the last thing you need is a bunch of scared people in the back of the plane panicking and raising hell; you can't be screaming "OH GOD WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE" over the radio. Not to mention the fact that if you stay calm and actually tell Mission Control what the problem is, you won't throw away what may be your last chance to actually work out how to fix it or at least get to the ground in one piece.
The "Real Life" section includes Yeager (with a long quote from The Right Stuff with an example of the voice) and Moody of BA Flight 9, plus many others, and comments:
> Yeager is the most known example and the book "The Right Stuff" made a nice legend, he probably isn't the first who started to talk that way. For example, Mark Gallai (a Soviet test pilot who started his career in the 1930s) recounts just this way of reporting over radio about as soon as radio was introduced on airplanes. Let's just repeat: when you need to report your condition to ground crew, you are going to speak calmly and clearly, no matter what's happening with your plane.
I'd wondered when "English understatement" and the similar "British understatement" came into being. Seems strongly correlated with the outbreak of WWII, :
War historian Antony Beevor discussed that stereotype thusly:
''Patriotism also permeated those British war movies of the 1950s and 60s – The Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky, The Cruel Sea, The Heroes of Telemark, The Battle of the River Plate, Cockleshell Heroes. It camouflaged itself in self-deprecation, but the rousing march music in the finale always braced our belief in the rightness of our cause. We have long made fun of all the period cliches, unable to believe that anyone talked like that. But when researching my new book Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, I found that German officers really did say to the British paratroopers taken prisoner: “For you the war is over.” One of my favourite remarks, recorded at the time by a junior doctor, is the reaction of Colonel Marrable, the head of an improvised hospital in the Netherlands, when Waffen-SS panzergrenadiers seized the building. Still puffing gently on his pipe, he says to his medical staff: “Good show, chaps. Don’t take any notice of the Jerries. Carry on as if nothing has happened.” I have always been doubtful about the notion of “a national character”, but a national self-image certainly existed during the war and for some time afterwards.''
> Despite the lack of time, Moody made an announcement to the passengers that has been described as "a masterpiece of understatement":
> > Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.