When Korean Air brought in David Greenberg, a retired Delta Air Lines vice president, to run its operations two years ago, he was given a tall order: rescuing the airline from international disgrace.
Among major international carriers, Korean Air -- 13th largest in the world -- had become a pariah after a string of disasters that began in 1983 when Flight 007 strayed over Russian territory and was shot down with 269 people aboard.
One accident after another seemed to strike the airline after that. By late 1999, when two of its cargo jets crashed within weeks of each other at Shanghai and at Stansted Airport near London, a total of 750 people had been killed in accidents. The airline was also plagued with smaller mishaps on domestic flights that cost no lives but heightened worries about the company and its future.
Against this background, Mr. Greenberg started with the airline's flight crews. He introduced rigorous new training and testing standards, as well as some ''cockpit culture'' changes for Korean Air's 1,700 pilots. On the ground, he began basing promotions and transfers in the company's ranks on merit rather than connections and friendships.
These efforts have been paying off with a steady rehabilitation of the airline's reputation, capped last month when Delta and Air France, after separately scrutinizing Korean Air's safety standards, approved the resumption of its membership in their code-sharing alliance, known as SkyTeam. Korean Air's access to the alliance, whose member airlines offer one another's flights to their passengers, had been suspended after the Shanghai and Stansted crashes.
This month, Delta and Korean Air jointly applied for an antitrust exemption in the United States that will permit them to coordinate marketing, pricing and promotions as well; approval is expected.
The airline has also won the lifting of a ban by the United States Department of Defense on its employees' flying on Korean Air planes. And last fall, the Federal Aviation Administration restored its rating of South Korean air safety to the top classification. For the four months the country was rated in a lower category, neither Korean Air nor its smaller rival, Asiana, could expand service to the United States or share codes with American carriers.
''It's kind of a turnaround story,'' said Richard Samuelson, chief of UBS Warburg Securities' Seoul office. ''We have lifted our estimate for Korean Air,'' he said, citing improvements in its safety record and the vote of confidence from the code-sharing partners.
Along with safety, Korean Air's finances have improved. After reporting losses of $450 million in 2001 and $352 million in 2000, the airline forecasts a $77 million profit this year. Traffic is returning to normal on trans-Pacific routes after slumping in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States, Korean Air officials say. Its flights to Japan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia are more packed than ever. The airline has a new hub airport at Inchon, near Seoul, and has high hopes for the World Cup soccer tournament, which will be jointly held in South Korea and Japan, beginning in May.
Investors have taken note, and the company's stock has more than doubled so far this year, outperforming even Korea's rising stock price index by a healthy margin. Lee Chan Ho, general manager for investor relations for the airline, attributed the rise to ''our operating performance,'' and said the airline was focused for now on profitability, not expansion.
Mr. Greenberg, 60, who was hired in January 2000 as Korean Air's executive vice president for operations, said he was looking forward to turning the reins back to a Korean executive next year and returning to retirement. The remainder of his tenure, he said, will largely be spent training a successor -- not yet named -- and inveighing against complacency and the temptation to cut corners if the economy slumps again.
Even with all the improvements, the airline remains under the overall control of the Hanjin Group, a conglomerate dominated by a powerful, close-knit family, as many large Korean companies are. And Hanjin has drawn criticism in the past for placing profits above safety, notably after the Shanghai crash, which the country's president, Kim Dae Jung, publicly attributed to mismanagement by the owners. An executive shake-up after that crash led to Mr. Greenberg's hiring.
''What's necessary is to keep the focus, keep the concentration, whether times are good or bad,'' Mr. Greenberg said. ''It takes years to build recognition, and one slip can destroy that. There's this tendency to become complacent, to say, 'We've perfected this thing, let's coast.' ''
According to an investigation by a team of Delta executives in 1999, many of Korean Air's woes were rooted in the airline's rapid expansion in the 1980's, when pressure to hire pilots quickly brought in many with minimal qualifications.
Making matters worse, most of its pilots were Korean Air Force veterans with a strong authoritarian streak. Senior pilots tended to ignore warnings or advice from copilots, especially those who had been their subordinates in the air force, and junior pilots were discouraged from speaking up.
The harm done by this dynamic was made clear in a 1997 crash in Guam that killed 228 people. An inquiry found that the co-pilot had failed to warn the pilot that the plane was descending onto a ridge as it approached the airport.
The airline's partners say it is putting such problems behind it. ''Korean Air has made a major commitment to creating a culture of operational excellence,'' said Paul Matsen, Delta's senior vice president for alliances. ''They have gone through a significant process.''
Photo: Lee Jong Hee, center, the executive vice president of Korean Air, with Paul Matsen, left, of Delta Air Lines and Patrick Bianquis of Air France when the three airlines signed code-sharing agreements last month. (Reuters)