The airlines are rolling in profit
Picking up the part that TeeVee has bolded:
The question then is, what actually is meaningful experience to an airline pilot these days? Realistically, there is only a certain amount of training that can be done. Can there be more than there is currently? Sure. But how much is enough? Is doing more hours in a KingAir going to make the airline pilot any safer? Who has actually been at the controls of recent airline accidents?
The thing is, we seem to find this type of "pilot error" accident hard to swallow. We don't like thinking that the human reacted incorrectly when the machine failed, seeing that is why he is there. But the whole point is that while we have an increase in the rate of these errors, the overall rate has decreased.
We are safer having a highly automated machine that occasionally kills us, than we are having a less automated machine that will kill us more often, but in different ways. But we like it less, and find it something that needs to be fixed.
I'm not sure where the balance is between allowing pilots regular hands on currency (with the commensurate slight decrease in safety) compared to the current scenario. The insurance costs just don't let new pilots get the experience in the aircraft they should. But at the same time, is it new pilots that are crashing aeroplanes?
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