safetypee's reply to a post of mine where I'd more or less divided up the blame between Boeing and, not the pilots per se, but the system in which they flourish - or not.
Loose rivets, # 135,
Your certainty about the technical aspects is not necessarily the same certainty about pilot performance. Technology, aircraft design, and manufacture, can be judged against hard requirements, whilst humans have no published requirements for their ‘construction’, and where output performance is judged by other, ill-defined humans, in situations seldom related to extreme events.
Hmm . . . preaching to the converted. I was still a young man when I had to deal not only with an alcoholic and probably psychotic captain, for weeks, but while a management and training staff that promised and promised to remedy the situation, simply never did. This guy had a long career behind him but still managed to singe the passengers queuing behind the jet pipe and then
take off three tonnes overweight in that little BAC 1-11. That's not a mistake. He was just not right, but the manager's lacking was wrong to the point of being sinister. If you've any ideas about Us being better than Them, I could fill in a year's worth of bizarre happenings leading up to me walking out of the best paid job I'd ever had. Ill-defined humans. That's a good term.
Despite spelling out that extraordinary situations can arise with any crew, I still maintain the ET crew were woefully inexperienced. It could be I'm plain jealous. It was 8,000 for PIC and 4,600 for FO when I moved over to the 1-11 after two years on Viscount. I clearly recall something 'clicking' at about 500 hours - at last I felt really at home on type.
Even with an experienced skipper, so much depends on their wellbeing and indeed, how they react when one day they are confronted with an extremely demanding emergency. Most of us need that other pair of experienced hands in those moments.