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Comment by babesh | Hacker News Reader

The pilot depended on automation to fly the plane. When put into a situation where it was not available, he crashed it showing insufficient piloting skill. That someone with this lack of skill was placed in this situation shows institutional failure.

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Agreed. I can't fathom how a person who self-described as "very concerned" with doing a visual approach got into the cockpit of a 777. That's the sort of thing I'd expect from a fresh student pilot who spent too much time playing with the ILS in his flight simulator.

maybe if he had been playing more with his flight sim this wouldn't have happened. it's such a basic mistake to make.

Alright, but how do you explain the instructor who had 3,200 hours on the 777 who was sitting beside the pilot not making any mention of a too low airspeed or incorrect landing configuration right up until it was to late? Makes me wonder if there was some ambiguity in the instrument display or procedures for neither pilot to make mention of any problems.

The pilot expressed his concerns about performing a visual approach to his instructor before the flight. The instructor let him fly anyway instead of instantaneously grounding him and saying, "WTF? This is Piloting 101, go get your shit together."

The instructor let this person fly when he was lacking such a basic skill, and that the instructor came from the same system that allowed this incompetent pilot to attain command of a large airliner. This to me indicates that the system is broken and there's no reason to think it couldn't produce an instructor who was also completely useless at performing a visual approach.

Exactly

The weather was as good as it gets. Anyone that had experience with "landing a plane", not pressing buttons like the modern cockpits encourage you to do would have landed it safely.

There have been some complaints about pilots from Korea (of course, not only them, but there are some structural problems in Korea that help this) not having good manual flight experience.

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