Three Three Mike?
TTM, I think you are being rather unfair to the two pilots who died in the Airborne Express crash in 1997. They were both vastly experienced in many forms of flying, with aprox. 8,000 hours each. They were test flying a 30 year old rusty DC8 with an unserviceable stick shaker. To say they crashed because of a failure of basic airmanship implies to me only that you haven't read or understood the whole report.
Anyone who flies any airplane when it has just suffered major repairs is, in effect, a test pilot. Most of us know that.