Goldfish
Thanks for your expert comments.
How does an airline pilot become competant to conduct tests such as these ? I know that there are a few excellent schools such as
ETPS Empire Test Pilots' School but they cannot produce enough qualified test pilots for all of the routine airline test work.
Is it just a case of senior captains being given the task and surviving or is there some formal best practice that should have been followed. These poor guys were thrown into the deep end of the pond and clearly did not have the experience or knowledge to cope when it went wrong.
Surely there should be rules somewhere to prevent good pilots being suckered into this kind of mess. Did you just drift into the job and learn by experience or were your formally trained before going into your testing career ?