I accept that 90% of what River's says is likely to be true today but I would be interested to read what he would now say with the benefit of the last eighty odd years of civil aviation accidents and the information gleaned from them.
I cannot speak for Rivers, but I would hypothesise that the safety record of the airlines suggests that their training programmes are highly effective when you look at the deaths per pax km stats.
I think our only difference in view is applying that training out of context and hopefully we'll never need to test our hypotheses
