Over here the 200 wonder cadet is a thing that has been normal for the last 60 years in airlines, so nothing new at all about it.
Flight International 5-11 April 2011.
Editorial Comment on page 9.
Headline:
TRAGICALLY FAMILIAR
Excerpts: "If the circumstances surrounding the loss of Ethiopean Airlines 409 at Beirut evoke a miserable sense of deja vu, it is hardly surprising. Another dark and thundery night, another departure over featureless terrain, another fatal spiral. The similarities with the Kenya Airways 507 inquiry...make it hard to avoid wondering how far the parallels go. It will mean a fully functional 737 spent 4 minutes blundering aimlessly through Mediterranean airspace on a flight path punctuated by automated warning after automated warning. In which case someone needs to ask; where was the airmanship?"
The copilot had just over 600 flying hours with half that on the 737. In other words what some cynics would term a 200 hour wonder...skilled at watching an autopilot but precious little else.
From FI again: "It is hard to ignore the near-identical nature of the two accidents, and - with all due defernce to the final investigation report - hard not to suspect that the root cause of Ethiopean 409's loss will not be anything complicated, but rather something depressingly basic."
It makes you wonder if too much accent is placed on the use of automatics during simulator training - when by the looks of things the priority should be on hand flying raw data instrument flying skills.