I am certain that Hyun-Ah “Heather” Cho rues her actions of December 5, 2014. She was on board an airplane about to fly from New York to Seoul. It had just begun taxiing away from the gate at John F. Kennedy International Airport when she realized that she had been given macadamia nuts in a bag. That might have sufficed for ordinary people toward the back of the plane, but she was in first class. And why not? She was a top executive of Korean Air Lines. It must be noted that she got her post not because of intelligence and hard work but sheer nepotism. Cho’s father, Yang-Ho Cho, is the company's chairman and CEO.
When the younger Cho realized that her macadamia nuts were not tastefully displayed in a bowl, she threw a fit. She loudly berated the stewardess who had committed this faux pas—handing out bagged nuts was actually in accordance with Korean Air procedures, even in first class—and then called for the chief steward, Chang-Jin Park. Cho forced him to kneel, unleashed a hail of insults and invective, and even hit him. As if he were not sufficiently mortified, she fired him on the spot. In Cho's view, since Park was no longer an employee, he obviously had to get off the plane. She insisted that the aircraft return to its berth and he be ejected. This resulted in a 20-minute delay. One may fairly ask why the pilot thought he should comply with such a demand, but he did.
The company sought to suppress public knowledge of the incident. The dismissed chief steward was contacted repeatedly and pressured to tell a compromised version of the story to the government’s investigative team (two members of which, interestingly enough, were employees of Korean Air). He refused to do so and informed the media; others who had been on board KAL Flight 86 spoke up. Cho dissimulated and then offered a weak apology, hoping it would all blow over. Usually these things do. But really, her actions in New York were so egregious that some repercussions were inevitable. Her father, after downplaying and seeking to justify her behavior, said she had been fired—notwithstanding the fact that Cho had a couple of other lucrative and high-paying jobs with affiliates he runs. He busted her only after seeing passenger rates on KAL drop nearly 7 percent in December 2014.
Media coverage of the story was widespread and relentless. Cho was savaged as the epitome of a power-mad chaebol executive who is above the kind of rules and courtesies by which most of us abide. Not only had Cho been exposed as a stuck-up, overbearing princess, she went to trial on a charge of violating aviation safety laws. On February 13, 2015, she was convicted and given a one-year sentence. There followed a scene of her walking out before a mob of cameras and reporters, bowing abjectly and acknowledging her sins.
I am not convinced she will serve her year behind bars like the hoi polloi would. The super-rich all over the world have ways of softening such unpleasantness, if not avoiding it entirely. But maybe she will. The incident for which she alone was responsible brought international ridicule, and I truly hope she has learned a lesson. There was a lot of schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the suffering of others) in this case, and it is a natural fact that Heather Cho has had a heaping helping of humble pie. Right now, she is almost surely the most despised woman in Korea.
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