Last edited by Burney; 07-13-2017 at 09:20 AM.
Too right you were. Especially these days, when most FOs are wet-behind the ear kids who have graduated from an approved course with no more than 250 hours total experience. They simply do not have the instinctive reactions to things going wrong which catch the problem in the first 5 seconds. The old generation of skippers is still around at the moment, but they're starting to retire and these kids are getting promoted to the left hand seat. It's quite scary, really.
I have a good friend who is a senior, very experienced skipper with a certain very popular airline and he tells me that these days, if he has, for example, a night flight into a meditaerranean island where he is likely to be making an approach, in the weather, without benefit of radar cover, he looks at the sprog next to him and realises that he is, to all intents and pruposes, going to have the do the job alone. And it's a two man job, so that's really, really hard.
Now imagine something going wrong in the middle of that...
Well, yeah. That's OK if there is some catastrophic incident and everyone gets wiped out immediately. What if there is a landing incident? All those bits of seats and bits of people flying around the cabin inflicting the most unimaginable injuries. And that's without the fire! And it's not just any old fire. AVTUR burns hot, p. Hot.