implied, read 2 post before. only foreign airplane crashes listed. also has been mentioned several times of shoddy maintenance on the 2 specific crashed talked about, while in the us, well it happens too. several crashes due to faulty maintenance.
In the cases of those crashes mentioned, the fact that they were all foreign is irrelevant and in no way removes any doubt that we have our own fair share if poorly trained pilots and MX crews. I have worked with both foreign and US MX crews and I can say with out a shadow of a doubt that in my experience (21 yrs) that rules tend to a bit more like suggestions with our foreign counterparts than with American trained crews.
Complacency will almost always end in a fatal accident when working in and around military and civilian aircraft.
none of you guys were there, you may have experience and be top of your training class/best at your job, but none of you were there. you read the after reports and say, well it was an easy fix, airplane could have been saved. but you still werent there. I even find it hilarious, when I mentioned they had 100's of flights without a crash and somebody said well they were lucky, it's automated or something like that.
We had a Talon go down about three years ago, both crew members were instructor pilots with 4 yrs of stick time in the Talon. They ended up losing hydro power resulting in a loss of flight controls. The back seater was able to punch out and the front seater rode that talon in to the ground. He could have ejected but HE failed to arm his ejection seat. I know exactly what happened to cause the pilots death, I knew before the investigation even started. How did I know, I have been working on Ejection seats for 19 yrs at that time and 16 of those years as a subject matter expert certified to troubleshoot and overhaul seats made by two different manufacturers with 5 sub designs between them on 5 different aircraft (F-16, F-15, A-10, T-38C and T-6 Texan II, soon to add the T-7). I responded to the crash, walked the debris field, located, dearmed and removed the unfortunate deceased pilots seat (It was in pieces). There was not a single explosive that was fired or a single component that was actuated.
So, yes, experience does play a role with ones ability to diagnose a situation properly.
so when somebody said you were arm chair captains or something like that, it's true. but I'll apologize if you tell me that while flying that plane, the same malfunction happened, you identified it correctly and landed that plane.
So, no, being called an arm chair general is about as far out in to left as you can get.
