More media speculation, but what concerned me again in this is this theme that when the aircraft drops out of normal law, some pilots (trying not to generalise) seem to not understand where the limits are. I'm keenly interested in more detail about this crash.
The issue becomes one of questioning the source, experience, and ability, of the 'pilots'. The advent of these very smart electric jets has led to a situation in which the counters of beans believe that dumbing down of the pilot population (aka, paying less) is an acceptable way to go. Airbus has been quite guilty in pushing this as a sales point for the aircraft. So, very low hour FOs are more the norm than the exception. The trouble is that you don't really gain flying experience in these aircraft. You may become knowledgable about the route structure, but they do nothing to improve flying skills. Accidents caused by quite extraordinary pilot responses, totally against basic flying instruction, have happened a number of times recently, and I expect their incidence to increase. AF447, Colgan and Asiana are three obvious ones, but I'm sure there are many others.
When the electric jets lose the plot, and some do so quite readily, they drop their protections, and revert to various forms of alternative laws. Sometimes these modes are very poorly described by the makers (which leads to confusion), but mostly they simply make the aircraft less smart. Ultimately they dumb down to the level of a perfectly normal 737/747/757/767. Trouble is that the pilots (with a very small p) flying these aircraft don't actually know how to fly them without these systems. Operations in many parts of the world are totally autopilot driven (for lots of reason), and in many cases FOs will have little hands on time. The ability to word perfectly remember checklist responses does nothing to improve piloting skills, but that's the way much of the training is done. Very junior pilots (i.e. SOs and cruise FOs) are mostly not even allowed in a window seat below about 20,000 feet. If they haven't learnt to fly already, they're unlikely to once in an airliner.
Note, there are airlines who have FOs who are actually paying them, not the other way around, as they have so little experience that no real airline will hire them.
All around the world, every day, Airbus (and Boeing too I guess) aircraft are successfully flown to an airfield (often the destination, and without the passengers having any inkling) after suffering system failures that lead to loss of protections. It isn't rocket science...it is very basic flying....just like a visual approach, in daylight, to SFO should be.
Just a quick other question. The flight was flying "without official authorization". What exactly does that mean? I'm reading conflicting information.
It sounds as if Air Asia didn't have approval from the Indonesian CASA equivalent to fly the route. Smacks of poor housekeeping on both parts.
