Quote Originally Posted by Hoser View Post
We have seen many of the reports on these two crashes. This is the first mention of the Lion Air having a jump seating pilot on board.

Planes are getting bigger, faster and more complicated. They require more heads down. In the old days you had a dude to manage systems called a flight engineer. But they replaced him with a computer and lost of an extra set of eyes up front.
The jump seating pilot was on the flight that took off and landed successfully the night before. Reports of him helping save that flight came out some months ago but may have gotten lost in the rush to blame Boeing. As both articles I linked to point out, there were some pretty fundamental errrors in airmanship in all three flights (2 crashes and 1 near-crash). That doesn't mean Boeing is blameless but it sure seems to me that Indonesia, Ethiopia, and others would like to heap all the blame on Boeing and avoid questions about their standards.