Probably the worst thing you could have is a cockpit full of pilots.

Well, I think it is generally accepted that the third pilot on the Qantas A380 uncontained engine incident was extremely usefull in securing a positive outcome and bringing the aircraft safely down on a runway.

The same can be said about the third pilot in the cockpit on the first Lion Air Max incident with the MCAS runaway where also that aircraft was brought to a safe landing. Acording to reports it was input from the third pilot that possibly saved that flight.
The two other known MCAS malfunctions had only two pilots in the cockpit, and both crashed catastrophically.

Al Haynes would have staunchly disagreed with you on that one.

Interesting. CES only operated three B767s, and they left the fleet more than a decade ago (2011).

It’s possible he went to the 737 after the retirement of the 767 and was still a check Captain giving a check ride. If so nothing to see here. That would not however be the normal career path.

I'm not a pilot.

If it was a check ride, I wonder if the check captain perhaps simulated some sort of emergency which was incorrectly handled and got out of control? I am well aware that it's not SOP to practise simulated emergencies with a plane load of passengers, however.......
Just a thought to add to the many others.

There are more options, e.g. the LHS PIC needing an instructor for reasons of recency.

Yet the Chinese official media are typically correct about what they are trying to say. F/O sounds like an F/O, especially if announced on the CAAC News website (did not check myself). Link click here.

Some is easier to imagine, such as a long-time LH instructor having enough of surfing the timezones and coming back to 737 i.s.o. 777/787, some harder. How does 31k hours fit within one lifetime?

I'm curious about this number also. Over 20 years that's flying about 30 hours/week.......every week.

Starting from early 80's, that's almost 40 years. So maybe 15-20 hrs/week

It says somewhere above that he was about to retire, so how about 40 years!? :hmm:

From the deleted files:

Joined Yunnan Airilnes 1985
Received 737 at Seattle 1988
Become captain 1991
Flew the 767 for more than 10 years

A post above claims CEAir retired 767 in 2011. That's at least 4 big trainings (5 months around) plus the last 2 years of COVID.

35 years gives 888 per annum without missing one. Tough love (or?).

I can’t conceive of that happening especially in China where every flight aspect is monitored. Line checks are to observe normal operations. Emergencies are practiced in the simulator.

I watched a "Lei's Real Talk" video in which she says she has information that the "award winning" 30k+ hours 767 captain "with unparalleled safety record" moved to 737s when the 767 fleet was retired (in 2011), then was involved in an incident last year where he flew "out of a terrain warning zone at an airport" which the company recorded as a "serious safety mistake" and demoted him from Captain to First Officer following a simulator test.

You are right. When I read the original Chinese stories, I didn't check the timeline. Now that you mentioned it, I went back and read that he had already started flying 737 many years ago. It's curious he wasn't promoted to captain.

There's rumor that he was promoted, but was then demoted back to FO after an incident. But it's a rumor on social media only.

I haven't flown the B737 but have flown & taught on the A320 & other Airbussi (as well as Lockheeds, McD's & Boeings); I am familiar with the Sriwijaya accident & earlier pitch-down accidents resulting from loss of crew situational awareness where it concerns a loss of engine thrust.

A loss of thrust at cruise power would result in some yaw but not an uncontrollable yaw and certainly good control over any roll, and if engine thrust had been set for the descent, (idle thrust) and the aircraft was descending normally, (about 2000fpm or so), there would essentially be no yaw at all.

I like what fdr has had to say on the subject and I think it is wise to consider this accident from what he observes as possible. I take seriously what he says about the few causes of significant pitch-downs occurring without the crew's roll input. As he says and provides examples for, we should look elsewhere and, unless seriously mishandled, not engine failure for the source of roll & pitch-down. Whether this is similar to the China Airlines B747-SP incident or not remains to be seen.

Would a real 737 pilot care to comment on the likelihood of a thrust reverser opening in flight...?

We've had a real Boeing propulsion engineer comment on that. Who has seen the investigation of Lauda 767 from the inside.

Nope, unimaginable (my wording).

FlightDetent, you called? :)
Actually, I don't recall commenting on the TR deployment on this thread.
After Lauda, Boeing added a 'third lock' to the reverser system on all aircraft (I believe the 737 NG uses a 'sync lock' that locks the device that synchronizes the movement of the T/R actuators). It would require three independent failures - of which two are non-dispatchable faults that should result in the reverser being locked out prior to flight. There have been issues in the past with improper lockout procedures on the 737 NG (basically it was possible to insert the lockout pin without it actually engaging) - memory says Boeing issued a fix for that (which was promptly AD'ed by the feds) maybe 15 years ago.
The probability of all three faults allowing a reverser to deploy in flight is something like 10-13/hr (i.e. one in 10 trillion flight hours), and even when dispatched with a latent failure of one the locks is something like 10-8/hr. So possible, but very, very unlikely.

All that being said, the reported flight profile of this accident does have a striking resemblance to what happened to Lauda.
At the risk of being called a racist again, I'd really like to know what was done to that aircraft as it sat on the ground for the two days prior to event flight.

Just to put that into perspective, it is roughly 1 billion flight hours for every 737 ever made...

Crew make up
 

it’s a few years ago now since I trained pilots on the BAe 146 for China North West. Maybe things have changed but the F/O’s easily adapted to EFIS while the captains, ex Russian aircraft, struggled.

As the F/O’s pointed out, they were condemned to be just radio operators for the next several years before being offered a command.

There was nothing I could do to change the system. Maybe things have changed.