Officer Kite: wrt "
OKC would the current 'airline' you fly for even qualify to fly in EASA territory?"
Actually, the answer to that is "Yes !", because it is an EASA licensed & regulated airline.
And Kite, you might like to consider that some of my prior colleagues in the sandpit, no doubt following well drilled SOP, in a perfectly serviceable modern aeroplane, one resplendent with all the bells & whistles in terms of flight guidance systems (
e.g. HUD/HGS, etc), managed to fly the f'ing thing straight into the ground and kill everyone onboard... now do you get my point?!
Indeed you would not believe the number of supposedly well trained & qualified pilots who could not tell me the precise sequence of how to and / or actually fly a go-around in a B737 (
and / or, come to that, in other Boeing types that I've flown too)... and, imho, that's a fine example of **** training being masked by SOP.
And, according to your previous comment of "
I know who's plane I'd rather be on". Well good luck to you on that one mate, as you might end up needing it, i.e. luck that the pink string monkey's & technocrats can still cope when the pink string breaks & the automatics fail them, i.e. when the beast isn't behaving as expected, or the SA is lost, and they've little or nothing to fall back against! E.g. Ethiopian into the Mediterranean and / or Air France into the Atlantic being just two cases in point.
And if more proof of that were needed, only a few weeks back I failed (
and demoted) a Captain for what was a complete cluster **** of a line check culminating in a massively unstable approach and a balls'd-up go-around, wherein most of it was due to an evident over-reliance on 'pink-string' & 'automatics' to get them out of the ****, in what - on that day - proved to be a very dynamic situation. Most days they'd likely have got away with it, but not that day, i.e. one with me sitting on the jump seat watching the debacle unfold. QED ?!
Oldaircrew: wrt "
copy of a copy"...
I fully concur ! 
donpizmeov: wrt "
This new training system may be great at teaching someone to follow an SOP but it's not very good at training them to be pilots."...
ditto !