If you do not know how to fly or configure a vor approach during your command training you WILL BE SCRUBBED.
My advice to the young guys going through is to take the crowd out of the game and fly the VOR approach raw data and manual thrust. Easier than the 120s briefing on the push-a-button, managed approach, with OEB limitations to boot.
But seriously, enuffsaid, aren't the demographics different now? Are we seeing ex-captains go through the process or First Officers from legacy type backgrounds adept with all the modern proficiencies?
You've taken a swipe at the newer generation and fair enough. But their timidity with the aircraft for example, which partly represents the lack of the bull being taken by the horns on a command course, is a systemic and cultural failure seemingly acknowledged now by the management. It's a tough issue to reverse.
Giggerty mentions another issue being the command upgrade program. Delivery hasn't been addressed but yes, the program itself generates a strong emotional reaction to stress and peer judgement that is probably not realistic to a consistent performance outcome from similar candidates due varying schemas. I saw this on arrival at KA. One highly experienced and respected aviator from a previous airline described his CT5 LOFT as a blur. He wasn't alone.
After all that investment and training, CT5 should be a kick-ass event yet highly experienced aviators were flying by the seat of their pants. I'd argue for every failure, what about the guys that just scrape through?
If you look in-house to our own incidents, did CT prepare our commanders with an authoritative knowledge and proficiency of the contemporary issues facing airline pilots? Or did our events indicate a seat of the pants blur and lack of proactivity or even reactivity of our training? Think high altitude handling, pumps and cockpit coordination, managed approach/CFIT, decision making whether on one engine, min fuel or having duty time expired.
I hope our leadership not caught with their pants down with a probable accountability and commercial necessity we haven't seen before. Lowering the command standard would invite risks that would probably cruelly play out on an airline that has viewed itself very seriously in the standards department for some time.
If I subscribe to the retired manager's logic that the high failure rate was representative of the elite capabilities of commanders at KA, I take my hat off to my contemporary colleagues. You must be the best in the business if we are at 0 % ! Chickens have come home to roost.