Modern Russian Jetliners
I can't be the first one to notice that many modern Russian transport category glass cockpit aircraft still carry a flight engineer. Any opinions on this? Do you think it's a help or hindrance? Is it just a hangover from Soviet times where a job was a job for life or is it a smart allocation of resources and manpower to facilitate task management? The Antonov cargo giants from the 1980's, many of which are still running carry a crew of at least 6, but they're built that way.
The Soviets/Russia/CIS have always got the butt end of a lot of jokes for being technologically, well not so much undeveloped as - unstylishly functional but sometimes I think they're smarter than they get credit for it that sense. At the end of the day, no industry will pay people to do a job if they don't feel it needs to be done.