[QUOTE=GordonR_Cape;10460385]@
meleagertoo
To take a contrarian viewpoint: If an aircraft is not safe to be operated by airlines in countries whose pilots are not top-notch, then it should not be sold to those airlines/countries. Or fix the aircraft, so that it is safe to be operated by less-than-perfect pilots.
The implication is that training outside the US and other "first world" countries is not up to standard. That may or may not be true, but nobody on this forum has control over all of those countries, and that discussion belongs elsewhere on the forum.
That contrarian viewpoint, if I may say so, is naiive in the extreme. One can no more withold aircraft sales on those grounds than one could of cars or power tools - They claim to be operating to international standards, if they choose to backslide on that why/how is it Boeing's or Washington's job to judge - ? Wouldn't that be a particularly unpleasant form of self-righteous paternalism? (a phrase I never thought I'd actually use myself!) WE allow them into or airports - we can't then refuse to sell them aircraft, or de we prefer our skies filled with their legacy antique vodka burners dthat haven't seen a spanner in a year and with 28 bald tyres out of 28 instead?
No one but you suggeted that 'training outside the US is not up to standard", (do you include Europe, Canada, Japan, Ozealand in that too?) and discussion of national standards is, I predict, going to become a pivotal matter in this whole affair so I suggest this is exactly the right place to discuss it.
I gather there is a freakish viewpoint out there that Boeing is responsible to fix the aeroplane so even imcompetent pilots can't crash it but that's so grotesquely unrealistic it's simply laughable. How on earth such weird cotton-wool woo-woo ideas ever got into an aviation forum beats me! This is real life for God's sake, not the bloody Guardian's social pages!
Oggers, I refrained from including ET409 - although it may well prove related I don't think it is wise to include what could be a one-off, that's a poor basis for a general conclusion wheras LionAirs's history of disasters is so long the next one might almost be predictable on a time-passed basis. If Ethiopian were to have another similar I might change my tune.
re your valid concerns about the Ethiopian CAA's state of denial let's not judge them until we see the final report. However given that Ethiopia is a single-party socialist state and the government controls every aspect of life including the CAA and by extension the national airline too I'm not expecting to learn much very from it beyond being long on rhetoric and short on critical facts but we'll just have to wait and see. I sincerely hope I'm proved wrong.
This makes it all the more essential that Boeing appear as open and honest as possible.