ZFT:
I read a quote somewhere around the turn of the century stating engineers have less say in the manufacturing of commercial aircraft at the C-suite level and pilots are becoming fewer and fewer in airline upper management. Over a decade down the road, the quote was prescient.
ZFT: To your excellent second point: A good airline is like a stable ecosystem with all of the parts and people working to support the whole, by design. A shift away from company training programmes towards anything mandated by manufacterers has great disruptive potential, I agree. Standardized OPS, one of the hallmarks of safety culture, will also suffer.
"The Boeing Model" 5 years or so ago? That was about the time Boeing's training arm was renamed and restructured. Interesting. Thank you.
ARINC ramblings: A few years ago, in a valiant quest to solve a minor flight data issue, one of our engineers used his own money to purchase ARINC data or documents that were not provided by the company, the aircraft manufacturer, nor the LRU OEM. He figured it out, and altruistically forwarded his fix to all parties, resulting in a form letter from the manufacturer, nada from ARINC, with the LRU guys the only ones following up with personal thank you and discussion during a dinner on them.