Sabenaboy, u r absolutely right that it’s very hard to blame cadet pilots. I m talking this from self experience of being one of thoseEthiopian cadet plots who was put on a highly automated machine like the 737 merely few months after graduating from training school with no other flight experience other than the 250 hrs of 40 yr old C172’s. the whole transition training was a huge rush mainly because ET was running short of flight deck crews on the 737’s. indoctrination class, which was common training for previous batches were skipped and to our amazement even some of us didn’t do any observation flight. I saw the cockpit for the first time on my first simulator training day. Before that, all we know was pictorial representation on the cockpit in our computer based class ( CBT ). I still remember I had no idea of how to fasten and unfasten the five point seatbelt on the 1st simulator session
since the C172’s seat belt is three point seat belt. While I was expecting my simulator training to start after a month, I was given one day notice to start because there was rescheduling after adding more shifts for simulator sessions. So my partner, who is a fresh graduate like me, and me had to spend whole night memorizing the emergency procedures and spit it out first thing in the morning on our training. but once we finished the simulator training, we were able to retain only few of those critically important procedures including the all too important recall items.
So like I said, no indoctrination, no observation flight and straight to assisted first officer postion. On my first assisted flight, I had difficulty of finding some offices like flight operations planner and documentation office to change worn out or missing charts from charts folder. My 1st assisted flight was the day I saw a real cockpit, which as u all know, is significantly different than simulator cockpit.
Finally, there is the case of an established culture in ET which is cockpit authoritarianism. Imagine a cockpit of fresh cadet with the lowest self confidence with an abusive captain who feels like the creator and maker of all things under the sky. I can say almost more than 75 % of the captains r like this. This is not coincidence though. The behavior starts from what we see in training schools where most of the instructors r ex-air force generals and colonels who see a trainee with so much disrespect. So it’s pretty much clear that a pilot who goes through a training like this develops little or no CRM knowledge.
The entire operation of ET is disastrous. There were so many close calls which r quickly swept under the rug thanks to a puppet CAA. ET409 was a disaster waiting to happen. The whole case is partly political also and I don’t wanna go into that section. However, while it should ve bn ECAA who checks if operations r done according to regulation, the order comes from ET to ECAA to tick the box and give approval on everything. ET is one of the few gov’t owned institutions who bring in large profit in the desperately needed hard currency so no wonder that the case of ET409 became political issue with Lebanon.
*** excuse mu grammar and spelling since English is my 2nd language.