Checkboard;
It is about a corporate culture of the normalisation of deviance.
Of course it is.
The brisk demonstrations and rhetorical questions regarding "no harm done" are beside the point. The statements and defence of this inappropriate privileging of non-crew members remind me of a Director of Safety who, in a response to a very hard landing seen in the FOQA data dismissed the data with the observation that such events occurred on earlier equipment before FOQA and we never knew then and nothing happened so there's no need to do anything with such data now, (ostensibly because it would ground the airplane for a check when no crew reported the hard landing...).
Things have changed since then and
so should they in terms of such voluntary exposures to risk, even as light as this silly demonstration of the quality of judgement of those involved is.
Of course the risk is low as it is in most ops today and of course it was done thousands of times. I have a newspaper photograph of a 'stew' on the lap of a pilot from the early '60's with a suitable story printed beside it.
The industry's safety record is exceptional, the fatal accident rate enviably low for the
very reasons that people here are wondering out loud about the dumb priorities of an organization or an individual operation that would place non-pilots, or non-endorsed pilots in the seat whether they flew X-plane or were endorsed on F-18's or whatever.
But people will obviously continue to do this, given the available comments here.