Too bad there wasn't an Ozzie in the cockpit of the Japan Airlines cargo 747 that crashed at Anchorage, Alaska, in 1977 because its American contract pilot was too drunk to fly and his Japanese copilot and flight engineer was too scared to say so. The captain was so sloshed the taxi driver who took them to the airport called the cops, but it was too late.

Does culture play a role in aviation safety? Interesting question, particularly as American domestic airlines at the end of this week will--barring a last-minute disaster--achieve a 65-percent improvement in their safety record over the last ten years while foreign carriers better their safety records at a substantially slower rate.

The opposite of Qantas cockpit socialization would be those products of strict and authoritarian societies, the Japanese and the Koreans. And yes, there have been several horrific crashes on Japanese and Korean carriers where it was made apparent that a copilot would literally rather die than wrest control from his captain. During the 45 minutes when in 1985 a JAL 747 flew essentially out of control after its vertical tailfin and rudder were blown off by a cabin pressure-vessel failure, the cockpit voice recorder showed that the only word spoken by the copilot in response to the captain's ineffectual commands was "hai" ("yes"). I'll bet a Western first officer would have had some bold ideas and what-the-hell suggestions, whether they worked or not. Ultimately, the 747 hit a ridge near Mount Fuji and killed 520 of the 524 people aboard, the worst single-aircraft death toll ever.

Cockpit resource management would be a concept as baffling to a Japanese airman as would China's feng shui be to an American left-seater.

Though it will inevitably seem racist, it's impossible not to be aware of the fact that some pilots for African airlines had never seen a piece of machinery in their lives before presenting themselves for flight training. After all, one of the reasons offered for the skill and quality of American pilots during World War II was that they'd grown up tinkering on the family Ford and driving John Deere tractors.

There was a crash in Central Africa some years ago when an African airline pilot landed his Boeing 727 on the grass alongside the paved runway of an airport because someone had told him it would prevent tire wear, and tires were expensive in Africa. Many died because the pilot had no idea that landing a 100-ton airliner on sod was roughly equivalent to suddenly deciding to drive a Mercedes limo through a forest at 100 mph.

And in the 21st century, you have to wonder how few Ugandan, Bolivian, Pakistani, Moroccan, Thai, Chinese, and other developing-world pilots grew up playing video games, while they sit in computerized cockpits using game-controller sidesticks that long ago became second nature to Western pilots.

Yes, we're all born equal. But in an air-transport cockpit, the more important thing may be how we grew up.