B’ar, I believe you’re allowing emotion to rule in your misunderstanding of the intent of good Kapt’s posting. It’s not a criticism of the experience or, to a lesser degree, professionalism of any individual. It’s a comment, made by people outside AN and with no axe to grind, (not the Kapt, who was just repeating it), that with the gutting of the airline’s experience base in that year we dare not mention left a void that has not been adequately filled and can never be filled when the vast majority of mentors, ie, the respected, experienced senior pilots, are not there to pass on years of ingrained habits etc to the up and comers within the airline.
AN was not alone in this. Ask around at QF and they’ll tell you a similar story regarding their 737 domestic operations. A detailed perusal of Flight Recorders (it may have been Quick Access Recorders, I’m not sure which) of their 737 fleet a few years ago in QANDOM revealed a number of practices, (none of which, I hasten to say, had resulted in an accident), that left the QF Flight Safety Department dismayed. I hesitate to cite any details here because I know there are journalists out there who read this site. Suffice to say it was appalling to believe anyone would do what the QAR/FDR revealed some captains had done with their aircraft with passengers and crew aboard.
Occurrences such as this are nipped in the bud very early in an airline where there’s an (even small) experienced, respected pilot base – even in new starts with a majority of young, relatively inexperienced captains usually have a leadership which sets the tone, or ‘safety culture’ of the airline. History has shown that airlines lacking an appropriate safety culture usually don’t see the distance for one reason or another.