Farmer - you miss the point. Air travel has gotten safer since the good old days primarily due to automation which allows a lot of the pilots who might be tempted to hand fly badly to land and conduct flights safely. The message behind this accident is that it was a bad crew who lacked CRM and a scan. In a word it's called 'professionalism' which I would define as an attitude that you will do the correct thing and ensure that you know how to do the correct thing no matter what the environment you operate in. Others have postulated a cultural dimension which could indeed have played a role - living in the region I constantly see examples of where professionalism is lacking due to cultural aspects but I would hesitate to assign that explanation to this accident. I have included a lot of negatively loaded words in my comments here but I feel that it is justified - the accident was due to a poor crew and this can happen with any airline in the world. There will always be poor pilots who slip through the net as it were.