I think to some extent people are comparing oranges to clementines here, Hans Brinker and Tommoutrie are talking about a Category B airfield on the coast of Spain. We also fly into plenty of Cat B airfields, and for them either pilot can land there, the decision about who does so being made by the crew (ultimately the PIC) on the day after reviewing the weather conditions.
Cat C is a bit more involved, and the rules are generally not even a decision by the operator alone, but involve the company's flight ops inspector as the representative of whichever national regulatory body grants the company AOC.
For Sptraveller, if you are referring to my post, then no, that isn't what was said. What was said was that the F/O was given five hours of training at VNKT (split equally into observer and PM), so they know exactly what the PF is doing. They also have an airfield visit with a line training captain flying the
aircraft, and before they do any of that they need to have 500 hours on type.
So there is no reason to think that they can't effectively monitor what the PF is doing. I would never have any worries about whether any of our F/O's would tell me to go around if I was making a dog's breakfast of it, I know that they are all perfectly capable and prepared to do that for any approach, anywhere.
Also, looking at it from the passenger's perspective, if you were going into VNKT at night, in turbulence, with visibility and cloud base at minimas, in the pouring rain, with your family sitting next to you, who would you rather have flying the aircraft, the five, six, seven (or seventeen) thousand hour captain, or the seven hundred hour F/O because the Captain wanted to be pilot monitoring.
Finally, just saw MD drivers post. Our ops manual is quite specific, "Captain's only approach, landing and take-off". So no monitored approaches and taking over at MDA in VNKT for us.
I should also point out that this is an enormous amount of thread drift...the training the airline I fly for gives is not necessarily the same as that given by
the airline involved in this crash, as we do not know what is in their ops manual and agreed with their regulator.