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.