Originally Posted by
Water pilot
We cannot forget that two planes from two different respectable airlines with legally qualified pilots crashed in short order, which is not something that happens very often. There is so far no reason to believe that those pilots were any more or less skilled than the thousands of their brethren so if this was just the sad fact that pilots don't know how to fly anymore,
I nearly spat my porridge when I read the first line of that.
Water pilot, do yourself (do us all) a favour and look LionAir up on wiki - and tell me if it's accident and incident record - along litany of written off airframes and fatalities - plus bribery at governmental level and flying routes wholesale without licences constitutes a "respectable" airline in your book. Look at the crew + engineering actions and procedures on the days preceeding their accident too...
Also check Indonesia's national historical accident record, which explains why for so long
all its airlines were banned from EU airspace, and how recently they were given a reprieve. Doubtless you'll assert that big cats can change their spots. I don't doubt it. What I do doubt is whether they have done so sufficiently.
Of course their latest accident just
might be an extremely unfortunate anomaly that a newly reformed company didn't deserve, but with a statistical background like theirs and the evidence from the preceeding flights not many would be taking bets on that I fear.
I can't comment much on Ethiopian, they do seem to have a good record although that statement is often heard qualified, but the non-stop floods of reports over many years of grossly exceeding pilots' flying hours as a matter of routine, failures to honour contracts or provide pay on occasions plus the latest suggestions about failure to publish/incorporate Boeings safety bulletins and lack of systems awareness even after the Lion Air accident make it plain that parts of their operation at least are not up to the sort of standards we expect in N Europe and the US, but I don't think we can judge their overall training quality and standards from the actions of just two pilots though it must raise doubts.
Do not mistake this for racism as doubtless some with auto-offend enabled will do. It most certainly isn't. It's called being honest and realistic. The only bit that isn't
proven to be factual yet is the Ethiopian amendment and awareness states, the rest is all hard fact, and even those doubts seem to be pretty much accepted if unproven as yet.
Both nations have historically beeen known for an almost total lack of democratic process, a history of repressive military rule (aka Dictatorship), a highly developed hierarchical society and steep if not near vertical authority gradients in the cockpit. None of these are condusive to the sort of open reporting culture of operations that so many of us here take for granted and it behoves us to take these cultural differences into consideration when we consider what's happened out there.
I've worked in Africa, including Ethiopia and things are simply not done the way we N Europeans expect out there. It shocks one at first but that's just the way it is, just as the way different nations have different driving habits and styles so they do too in Aviation. They also have different ideas on legal matters, so 'legally qualified' may mean one thng to you and something entirely different in a gynae clinic in a fovella in Rio...
This is just another aspect of what's turning into an extremely complex matter which doubtless will become even more so before any resolution is found.