The captain is clearly at the edge of panic.

CAVIEDES: Advise him we don't have fuel.

Klotz gets back on the radio with ATC.

KLOTZ: Climb and maintain three thousand and, ah, we're running out of fuel, sir.

There it is again. No mention of the magic word "emergency," which is what air traffic controllers are trained to listen for. Just "running out of fuel, sir" at the end of a sentence, preceded by the mitigating "ah." If you're counting errors, the Avianca crew is now in double digits.

CAVIEDES: Did you already advise that we don't have fuel?

KLOTZ: Yes, sir. I already advise him...

CAVIEDES: Bueno.

If it were not the prelude to a tragedy, their back-and-forth would resemble an Abbott and Costello comedy routine.

A little over a minute passes.

ATC: And Avianca zero-five-two heavy, ah, I'm gonna bring you about fifteen miles northeast and then turn you back onto the approach. Is that okay with you and your fuel?

KLOTZ: I guess so. Thank you very much.

I guess so. Thank you very much. They are about to crash! One of the flight attendants enters the cockpit to find out how serious the situation is. The flight engineer points to the empty fuel gauge, and makes a throat-cutting gesture with his finger.* But he says nothing. Nor does anyone else for the next five minutes. There's radio chatter and routine business, and then the flight engineer cries out, "Flameout on engine number four!"

Caviedes says, "Show me the runway," but the runway is sixteen miles away.

Thirty-six seconds of silence pass. The plane's air traffic controller calls out one last time.

ATC: You have, ah, you have enough fuel to make it to the airport?

The transcript ends.

9.

"The thing you have to understand about that crash," Ratwatte said, "is that New York air traffic controllers are famous for being rude, aggressive, and bullying. They are also very good. They handle a phenomenal amount of traffic in a very constrained environment. There is a famous story about a pilot who got lost trafficking around JFK. You have no idea how easy that is to do at JFK once you're on the ground. It's a maze. Anyway, a female controller got mad at him, and said, 'Stop. Don't do anything. Do not talk to me until I talk to you.' And she just left him there. Finally the pilot picks up the microphone and says, 'Madam. Was I married to you in a former life?'

"They are unbelievable. The way they look at it, it's 'I'm in control. Shut up and do what I say.' They will snap at you. And if you don't like what they tell you to do, you have to snap back. And then they'll say, 'All right, then.' But if you don't, they'll railroad you. I remember a British Airways flight was going into New York. They were being stuffed around by New York Air Traffic Control. The British pilots said, 'You people should go to Heathrow and learn how to control an airplane.' It's all in the spirit. If you are not used to that sort of give-and-take, New York ATC can be very, very intimidating. And those Avianca guys were just intimidated by the rapid fire."

It is impossible to imagine Ratwatte not making his case to Kennedy ATC-not because he is obnoxious or pushy or has an enormous ego, but because he sees the world differently. If he needed help in the cockpit, he would wake up the second crew. If he thought Moscow was wrong, well, he would just go to Helsinki, and if Helsinki was going to bring him in with the wind, well, he was going to talk them into bringing him in against the wind. That morning, when they were leaving Helsinki, he had lined up the plane on the wrong runway-and his first officer had quickly pointed out the error. The memory made Ratwatte laugh. "Masa is Swiss. He was very happy to correct me. He was giving me shit the whole way back."

Ratwatte continued: "All the guys had to do was tell the controller, 'We don't have the fuel to comply with what you are trying to do.' All they had to do was say, 'We can't do that. We have to land in the next ten minutes.' They weren't able to put that across to the controller."

It was at this point that Ratwatte began to speak carefully, because he was about to make the kind of cultural generalization that often leaves us uncomfortable. But what happened with Avianca was just so strange-so seemingly inexplicable-that it demanded a more complete explanation than simply that Klotz was incompetent and the captain was tired. There was something more profound-more structural-going on in that cockpit. What if there was something about the pilots' being Colombian that led to that crash? "Look, no American pilot would put up with that. That's the thing," Ratwatte said. "They would say, 'Listen, buddy. I have to land.' "

10.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede was working for the human resources department of IBM's European headquarters. Hofstede's job was to travel the globe and interview employees, asking about such things as how people solved problems and how they worked together and what their attitudes were to authority. The questionnaires were long and involved, and over time Hofstede was able to develop an enormous database for analyzing the ways in which cultures differ from one another. Today "Hofstede's Dimensions" are among the most widely used paradigms in crosscultural psychology.

Hofstede argued, for example, that cultures can be usefully distinguished according to how much they expect individuals to look after themselves. He called that measurement the "individualism-collectivism scale." The country that scores highest on the individualism end of that scale is the United States. Not surprisingly, the United States is also the only industrialized country in the world that does not provide its citizens with universal health care. At the opposite end of the scale is Guatemala.

Another of Hofstede's dimensions is "uncertainty avoidance." How well does a culture tolerate ambiguity? Here are the top five "uncertainty avoidance" countries, according to Hofstede's database-that is, the countries most reliant on rules and plans and most likely to stick to procedure regardless of circumstances:

Greece

Portugal

Guatemala

Uruguay

Belgium

The bottom five-that is, the cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity-are:

49. Hong Kong

50. Sweden

51. Denmark

52. Jamaica

53. Singapore