Racist and patently ill-informed comment from Australian 'expert' reported on New Straits Times
""Neil Hansford said that either the Indonesian captain or French first officer had plotted a “dangerous flight plan"
“Whether they read the meteorology right they were given in Surubaya...And how well did they communicate? One whose basic language is Bahasa and the other guy’s basic language is French.”
Racist?
Maybe ill informed, maybe not.
He may well be right that as in other recent crashes, there was no fault with the aircraft.
I would suggest that language differences are a significant human factors issue in flight deck communications. Just as in journalism, where the original Neil Hansford sound bites may have been summarized by a native Chinese speaker and perhaps retranslated back into English for release by the Xinhua news agency.