Cultural incident

If you understand culture you'll understand that in Arab culture saving face trumps everything else. Arabs can not be rational because saving face is the highest value, not logic, consequence or empirical evidence.

Here is a story where seven Arab engineers ran an $80 million new A360 Airbus into a wall and killed most of the people in the cockpit (the news of the deaths is covered up to save face, but you can tell that everyone died by looking at the damage in the photo).

My guess is that the chief engineer came from the most important family and was the oldest son.  The engineer who knew the most about the plane was the last son of an insignificant woman.  The chief made the decisions that ran the plane into the wall and ignored whatever the most knowledgeable engineer said.

Comments

[Someone]

It seems that in western culture, getting your facts straight is trumped by everything else, most notably the need to sensationalise.

There is no such thing as an Airbus A360 (yet). What they crashed into that wall was an Airbus A340-600. You may also want to look for alternative sources of information. The A340 never was "the largest passenger airplane ever built". Sounds like some one copy-pasted stuff from all around the melting pot of inaccuracies that is the Internet.

[Jonathan Silber]

Withholding the names of the Arabs involved, so as to save face, works like a charm: the respect the rest of the world has for Arab intelligence remains unchanged.

[Jonathan Silber]

The dealer is probably praying the Arabs don't ask for a loaner.

[Jonathan Silber]

The chance of an accident like this one is lower, I'm told by a dealer, if a salesman rides in the back seat when the customer takes a test drive.