It seems the only ones worried by this are the non-pilots!
I think everyone else understands that:
- The young lad wasn't controlling anything - he was simply repeating, "parrot fashion" the instrucitons the controller sitting next to him was saying.
- The controller was plugged into a dual headset, and there was never a time when they couldn't have overridden the child, had that child suddenly said something "unexpected".
Regards the Russian accident - the FO was in the right hand seat, the left seat had the captain's son. (The captain's daughter had been in that seat previously.)
The
really criminal bit was that the FO had the seat cranked back, and was too short to reach the controls from that position, and no one was monitoring what the young lad was doing with the controls, or was able to diagnose that the pressure the young boy had applied to the control wheel had dropped the autopilot into control wheel steering.