Originally Posted by PJ2
Skills, knowledge, readiness and discipline are our responsibility alone and where we deem them threatened we have to speak up, just as we are doing here, at conferences and in management meetings.
PJ, you are informed, articulate, well spoken, etc, but the quoted statement is part of the problem. It's true, but that doesn't matter. The pilot being "responsible" does nothing to bring back 228 dead people. The pilot being "responsible" does nothing when he/she is responsible for a system that has outgrown his capability. Allowing the pilot to take "responsibility" for failures in training, checking, regulation, oversight, design and design philosophy will accomplish nothing in our quest to remain safe.
I suspect you are either a senior Check Pilot or other instructor for a legacy carrier. Come down a bit lower in the ranks and you might see what I see - new hire pilots that go straight from the right seat of a B1900 to the right seat of a CRJ to the right seat of an A321. I know of exactly that background pilot today flying left seat of international ops A320's. They've never had an hour of instruction in high altitude, high speed ops. They have somewhere around 100 hours flying pitch and power with no Flight Director. I can go on, but I'll sum it up with this. As previously posted, sometimes you don't know what you don't know. I believe a significant portion of the younger generation is in exactly that state. They don't know what they don't know, and very few airlines are willing to spend the money to inform them.
So it's nice that they are "responsible" but we all better hope they have some luck to go along with it.