Originally Posted by
rickair7777
Actually this is not the case at all, the Europeans are not quite as safe as US airlines. If you look at comparable operations (ie compare regionals to regionals, international to international).
There are blatant examples of things which would probably not have happened in the US: Flying a stalled widebody into the ocean with full aft stick deflection. Germanwings dude, whose mental and other health records were protected from his employer and regulators by european privacy laws. Two TCAS equipped airliners collide because a center controller was taking a nap, illegally but tolerated by the private contractor who employed him.
But of course they are much safer than any of the rest of the world other than the US, by a large margin.
I think there is messy accidents in both continents (AA587, NW225, ValueJet 592, etc)....
About Germanwings.... in Europe you need to pass an 4 hours a hard psychiatric and physiologic interview to get you class 1 cert. Some companies even use polygraph Here in the US, the medical is a really joke... I heard a month ago that a guy in the US crash his Citation in his wife's home after pass a night on jail because a dispute.
Air France and Lufthansa have one of best instruction center WW... with a very elevated high standards. Have you heard about the tests that you need to pass to get hired in Germany aviation? take a look... please and compare it.
btw, Quantas (European model company) never had crash, Easyjet never had crash, Ryanair never had a crash.... British had only was crash in 1985. I dont know from where is coming that European companies are worst that US in accidents...
Anyway, coming again to the point... how many of that accidents are related to primary training issues, or checkride failures...
Air France, Germanwings pilots have a pristine training clean record. btw, KTM Tenerife's captain that cause the worst accident in aviation history had the best training record in KLM history....
Is there a real correlation about checkride failures and accidents?
Colgan accident was the one that opened Pandora's box about records, and big percent of the aftermath political decisions was caused because Beverly Eckert died on that crash.
Failures in GA, you're trusting DPE criteria and judgement, and after what I saw for many years I found lot of this designees with more issues in judgement than the applicants. Of course there is good professionals but delegating the examination authority and allow a dirty black market (700$ average per checkride, cash money) was a horrible idea.
I truly believe that a test that is going to impact all life employment applicant history should be administered by a federal worker without involving cash money.