Well, if by operator, you mean the airline, well they are in charge of employing sufficiently skilled pilots and providing them sufficient training to get their passengers from A to B safely. The airline is also in charge of purchasing sufficiently safe equipment to do so, and maintain it to a sufficient standard.
If they fail to do this, they must accept some liability for the failure. Whether they failed to do this is not yet ascertained...
I think it would be somewhat unlikely for liability to be attributed to Ethiopian Airlines for failing to doubt the safety of a brand new aircraft from a major manufacturer that had been certified as safe by the regulator. To my mind, operators buying aircraft are entited to rely on the assurances of a competent authority that design and manufacture complies fully with the standards that have been laid down. This is the fundamental principle behind the certification process - the standards are there to ensure safety, and purchasers should therefore be confident that the equipment satisfies their duty of care to pax and crew in this regard.
As for training, how are you supposed to train, or direct training, for a system on which you have little or no information? If an airline ensures that its pilots complete the training recommended by the manufacturer and approved by the regulator, it would be very hard to prove at a later date it should have guessed that more needed to be done.
QUOTE] If, on the other hand, by “operator” you mean the particular pilots involved, well, in my opinion, pilots have a personal obligation to maintain a standard on top of that required by their employer and their regulator. [/QUOTE]
A laudable view but hard to achieve in practice. Regardless of the operation (fixed wing, rotary, commercial, non-commercial etc) there will be those who achieve and maintain a higher standard than that required simply because they are gifted as pilots, whereas others will have to work much harder. That said, I agree with the point about money/investment - it is next to impossible for pilots to voluntarily improve skills when the tools do the job are unavailable because of policies on hand-flying v automation and the absence of resources for non-jeopardy sims.
It is going to take multiple lines of specialist investigation to bottom all this out. In 3500+ posts on the thread, we still have arguments raging about what this crew should have done (with hindsight...), how MCAS works and why it was implemented, what the implications are for managing the trim system, where the design may have failed, the roles of Boeing and the FAA in the certification process, what should happen with training, and of course the inevitable PPrune sport of playing the man rather than the ball. We have had some very thoughtful and helpful interventions and some frankly unhelpful diversions
For the purposes of further meaningful discussion, I think it would be very useful if someone could collate the most valid information on MCAS and the MAX trim system and have it posted on a separate locked thread that the rest of us can use for reference. That way, some of the excellent grains of truth in this very lengthy thread would not be lost/forgotten, and we would not have to keep going round the same buoys time after time.