If the poor guy had been an Indian national, there would have been no hesitation in rushing to judgment and talks about smoking holes would have reappeared with everyone saying "I told you so".
I know there will be a flurry of postings denying this but I am pretty sure there is a group of folks out there who are almost wishing that the Captain had been a national to prove their wild theories about incompetent Indian pilots and how Indian aviation can only be saved by British/ American/European/Australian expert expats.
BRILLIANTLY PUT !
Which is also the reason why there are hardly any responses by those very people who used to scream and warn about "smoking holes" very recently in certain threads in this forum.
I can not agree more with what our fellow member jimmygill had written sometime back.
SAFETY has VERY LITTLE to do with number of hours in a pilot's logbook.
How and where those hours came from is perhaps equally (or more) important.
Safety is not about 10,000+ hours (expat or Indian).
Safety is about the STANDARDS in place.
Safety is about ADHERING to the regulations and SOPs.
Safety is about not diluting standards or lowering the bar on quality.
A 250 hours CPL holder can very much be trained to be a good, safe, competent pilot of a transport jet if an organization invents enough resources on good training.