Originally Posted by
737 Driver
Okay, as one of the posters who has been highly critical of the airmanship displayed by the accident pilots, would you please show me where I said anything denigrating about their ethnicity or nationality? Poor airmanship is poor airmanship regardless of race, creed, gender, citizenship, favorite football squad, or whatnot. And if it makes you feel any better, I believe the problem lies more in the training and airline culture in which they were raised than any individual shortcomings.
As a side note, I have invested a fair amount of personal time researching issues related to these accidents to include sifting through available aviation safety and accident databases. There have been plenty of other cases of commercial airline instrument failures leading to unexpected system responses and confusion among the crew. You just don’t hear about them because these events had a successful conclusion.
The notable exception was AF447 - loss of airspeed, confusing alerts, systems reacting in ways the pilot flying wasn’t expecting, improper crew response, followed by a hull loss and major loss of life. This was another clear example of the pilots’ failure to revert to basics and fly the aircraft. Their ethnicity or employment at a major European carrier granted them no special protection from a failure of airmanship.
AF447 impacted the manufacturer not because of ethnicity issues but BECAUSE THE VICTIMS, PILOTS AND THE AIRLINE WERE SITED IN THE COUNTRY THAT BUILT THE PLANE AND CERTIFIED IT. So basically everyone concerned ended strung up in front of the same investigation system with an angry populace, and investigators could speak to all actors, and in the end everyone got blamed, AF for not swapping out the pitots, the pilots for winning the Darwin award, and the manufacturer for a tech failure and bad ergonomics.
In the case of the Max, the issue of "foreign carriers, foreign pilots" is getting raised as a way for Boeing and the FAA critters to wrangle their way out of a proper accounting for a design and certification process failure, with the dog whistle that the "foreigners" shouldn't be allowed to cash in on the liability payments generously provided by US courts to US victims.
Everyone here is very aware that if 400 US citizens had died in 2 plane crashes, Boeing would be facing serious financial consequences, and there would be a real congressional inquiry re. the FAA's somewhat lax certification practices.
Nobody anywhere in the world believes that the pilots on board the two sadly doomed airframes were anything other than perfectly average trained individuals. In fact Boeing's customers mostly employ pilots of average abilities, because they employ a lot of pilots. There may be some retired fastjet pilots in the trade, but they are now outnumbered by civilians.
Interestingly, on this forum, pilots seem to blame the Max pilots for not flying their planes, while engineers blame the design and the process. Quite possibly both are correct.
Edmund