The speaker is consistent with the chapter on plane crashes in Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, which is a nice treatment of the science around this issue and the movement which led to hiring expat trainers in the first place. As the post's author mentions, inflexible thinking and failure to challenge authority was a fairly common theme in airline crashes of "high power-distance" cultures like Korea (and not low power-distance cultures like the US) for a good while, to the point that aviation authorities felt a need to do something about it.