Skill training, skill retention and skill fade have not been a contributing factor to any of the recent accidents on either the Boeing or the Airbus. Recent Scientific Research points to the contrary.
Lack of understanding of Automation and how it behaves in a non normal situation is what has caused the recent accidents including the 777 accident in Dubai.
I think I should print that out and pin it to my office wall.
Not because I agree 100%, but because it 100% highlights an issue, to which there is no easy answer, but which is essential to understand avialion safety and the interaction between men and machine.
While "skill" is typically understood as "human automatics", as the ability to cope with situations you have learned to cope with, without having to think your way through, the issue indeed is more with situations where you need to think, where you need to understand what the problem is that you need your skills for.
One element of the problem for sure is, that you need to be so skilled, that you have some percent of spare brain power available in any situation. You should be so well trained and up to date to "fly the aircraft" that you have some resources left to deal with an issue. This is why the minimum skills we should expect from a pilot must always be more than the minimum it needs to safely fly an aircraft. We must require a standard above the absolute minimum, to keep a certain margin for the unexpected.
The other element is that you need to have enough understanding of all the details of your aircraft systems, that even if it surprises you by some action or reaction, you are able to understand what it is doing, why it is doing, and what you can do about it.
This includes to accept, that there is nothing like a perfect system. There is nothing bad about having a non-perfect system, as long as all the imperfections are well documented, published and told to the pilots.
There were times, when the pilots had the skills, and the FI had the detailed knowledge about the systems. Now the systems have replaced the FI, but who has the knowledge about the systems now? And do the systems relief the pilots enough, to give them that extra capacity to additionally know about all of the even much more complicated systems? According to the statistics, the answer seems to be yes. According to many recent accidents, the answer may seem to be more complicated