Nicholas49,
You have to trust the system, and that is exactly where the problem is. The whole aviation system of check and balance is based on ethics.
It was designed in a day and age where aviation itself was in its infancy and there were only a handful of operators, run by people other than accountants.
The idea was to have rules and regulations as the minimum acceptable standard not the benchmark.
Unfortunately aviation had to expand and now you have more and more people wanting to fly ever so cheaper.
The outcome of all this is that way too many people slip through the system all over the world. Probably more in some regions than others.
How are you to know whether the man or woman upfront is the one that slipped through? It is the luck of the draw. You just have to blindly trust an inadequate system.
I do not think that people who buy a Continental Airlines ticket would ever imagine being flown around by a underpaid, fatigued not properly trained crew.
Should people who simply cannot fly the plane like in Buffalo and Amsterdam carry passengers? Certainly not. I agree with rainboe on this. But how do you fix the system?