Sunday, November 23, 2008

Taiwanese passengers accuse Asiana Airlines of discrimination

From China Smack, via a bunch of Chinese-langugage sites and a hat tip from A Waygook Next Door:
Airplane delays departure to let “Korean passengers go first”

28 October, an airplane for Korea’s Asiana Airlines was delayed due to a mechanical problem while in Taiwan. After Taiwanese passengers suffered many hours of waiting, the plane finished repairs and was preparing to depart. But Asiana Airlines then notified Taiwanese passengers to let the Korean passengers go first, enraging the Taiwanese tour group who pointed out that this was discrimination against Chinese people.

That website has screen captions from a news report with very roughly-translated English summaries. While I can imagine something like that happening, I'm not really sure what to make of this case since that website is so uninformative.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If I have time, I will follow the trail to the source, but my gut feeling, based on past examples of fabricated news stories and hearsay painting Koreans in a negative light, is that this is yet another anti-Korean internet myth spun by imaginative Chinese netizens.

Korea Marc. said...

Oh, I believe it 100%. I have been discriminaed against several times on Asiana in favor of Koreans. I have over 500,000 miles on Asiana and once while traveling with a group on business to Saipan, several members of our group were upgraded to Biz Class at the gate. I asked them how and they didn't know. I asked the agent at the gate why others were upgraded and not those with large mileage accounts. She said " We only upgrade Koreans, not foreigners, becasue Koreans will complain if we upgrade a foreigner. I then proceeded to tear up my mileage card and gave it to the supervisor. Since then, I never fly Asiana.

Muckefuck said...

Speaking of airlines, has anyone read about Malcolm Gladwell's account of Korean Air? In his new book, Outliers, he discusses how the Korean hierarchical system was related to airplane crashes.

http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2008/12/04/malcolm-gladwell-on-culture-cockpit-communication-and-plane-crashes/?mod=rss_WSJBlog?mod=marketsColBlog