All pilots onboard this flight have close to 10,000 hours or more. First, you can ask any long haul PICs how many hours they spend sleeping in the bunk and it still counts as flight hours in the logbook.
Well, maybe the public should know the reality of experience counted in flight hours, for lack of a better reference.
To reply to some posts racial comments that were supposedly made (and I believe most experienced folks on this forum have well explained this to be cultural rather than racial differences), the culture in this part of the world is very different from what we see as western standards.
Of course western countries also do have accidents, incidents and other mishaps, but I would like to point out one factor that seems not too well expanded here.
I have been flying as a captain on A320 for a few years now in China, and as TRI on other types in various countries in South East Asia. While I have met skilled individuals, I was surprised (still am, and the word is weak) to see what counts as experience in some of these countries.
To me, the Asiana pilot could have 30,000 hours that I would not be more impressed. Some (Asian) airlines do not allow the FO's to touch the flight controls during takeoff and landing, unless they are with an instructor, which happens twice a month at best on short haul. In one of my posts last year I had mentioned the concern of having FO's ready for upgrade (3500 hours or more) but they lack the total number of landings. They need 400 landings to get upgraded.
This means that when a pilot gets his first command of a jet liner, he/she has clocked a total of 400 landings in their whole professional career. On top of this, I have seen jumpseaters log the flight hours as well, even getting signatures on their logbook from training captains while they just sat on the jumpseat picking their nose and smoking cigarettes.
And guess what? When they have the opportunity to fly with a training captain/instructor, they will have the controls only when the conditions are near VMC, no wind, etc.
So it would be interesting to know how many landings the pilots have at the controls, and how many landings they have done in the last week or month or year, to make a more realistic picture of the proficiency/recency of a pilot.
Of course, getting an upgrade on the 777, you gotta start somewhere, and there was a time for all of us pilots where we had no experience on a new type. Nevertheless, if your experience before the new type can be traced to thousands of actual hand-flown landings, in whatever aircraft, it should definitely make a difference.
The new generation of pilots, jumping straight from flight school to a fast jet are missing not only experience, but exposure, and exposure comes with experience.