We need the investigations of both these accidents (Trans asia and air asia), to have far reaching implications, and tangible results. The Trans Asia management will want someone to "Blame" (their words), and it not surprisingly, it wont be themselves, they have a scapegoat to shift 'blame' and therefore culpability/liability. They are responsible for creating the airline culture or environment where there was the potential for poor training and or recency to exist on THEIR flight decks and they did nothing about it. What is even worse, they were probably 100% compliant with inadequate outdated regulation at the time. Regulators in this case, (two fatal accidents in 7 months that could have been avoided) are clearly inadequate at regulating these companies. Both the companies and the regulators fail to face the industries new reality, low time pilots on the flight deck. Regulations as they stand are written at a time when experience was abundant, and to make it onto a flight deck, you had to be very experienced, or the son of a current chief pilot. Most of this stuff was written post world war 2! We face a new environment, we now have the situation where companies are quite happy to have 80hr pilots in the right hand seat, and they would lower this figure if they could save a few more bucks. Regulation needs to be updated to reflect this new flight deck dynamic, that is the first step, then airlines need to train for this new environment. The company is great at training them to press buttons, and read books. It is woefully inadequate at teaching them to manipulate the controls, in fact it discourages it! Why not use sim down time with the motion switched off to have "a pole around?" Why do we discourage that? Why do we have very restrictive rules in our books that tell them when they can switch the automatics off, but right next to that book sits the MEL that allows them to dispatch with the automatics not even working? What do they do during the bits they weren't allowed to hand fly?!
We need to support the pilots on this, as a unified international pilot group that has had enough of woefully inadequate company driven cost savings in safety resulting in the deaths of passengers and crew. We need to unify under IFALPA or another organisation and take it to them, get them to investigate properly, not just find a scape goat and try and pin it on the crew, or in this case, their estate, as they have paid for the companies poor standards, and the regulators inaction to improve those poor standards, with their lives.
If you think any other airline in the world would support you if you have an 'event', you are poorly informed, and will be very disappointed. those expensive company lawyers are there to protect the companies interests, and to divert liability, they are no there to protect the crew. The same with the insurance companies, they will employ all their assets to reduce their payouts, so who do you think they will gun for???
