Rereading my post, I realize now how it could be taken wrong. "Good luck, you'll need it" was not meant as a negative comment towards the pilot asking about Atlas. Unfortunately, I failed to adequately convey that.

My intent was to wish this pilot, and all new hires for that matter, the best of luck navigating the Atlas Air training program. The program is designed to take pilots with thousands of hours flying international heavy aircraft and teach them how to fly our specific aircraft. The program is not designed to successfully train pilots with minimal time or little to no jet time and successfully train them. We have pilots with those backgrounds that make it but we also have many who do not.

Atlas Air new hire failure rate 30%
Southern Air new hire failure rate 60%

Without a redesign of the training program, we are really doing a major disservice to the careers of those who pass through the front door.

Pretty damn bad. I’m one of the many hoping to move on ASAP...

Since the crash we've announced no causal factors, announced no changes to operations or training other than an uptick in new-hire failure rates. In fact we have congratulated ourselves several times. An employee survey was sent out shortly after the accident. Since then the only thing we've seen was a hearty "good job!" to those in charge. Moreover successive layers of oversight and safety are being eroded across both organizations by developing what I believe are targeted conflicts of interest. Call me a cynic, but I've seen this play out before in two previous lives.

Folks with a background in stan-eval, safety, management, etc. will see all the hallmarks of an organization maneuvering to cover itself rather an an organization maneuvering to correct fatal faults.

People read these forums. So here's what we need:
Admit fault at all levels of command and in all departments. We all failed and people are dead. There's no dodging this.

1.) Admit multi-level failure of our flight ops, training and safety departments. People are dead. We failed. Pay the families.
2.) Announce an organizational recovery plan. Move incentives away from defense to improvement.
3.) Tie career progression to measured improvements. The specific metrics can be worked out by bigger brains than mine, but we need hard data to support this rather than subjective evaluations. We've proven that our judgement is lacking.

Until we're on the mend we're in decline.

Spot on.

Just had a conversation with a friend of mine in the training department. (We are on the SAI side of the fence). He said that he thought there was going to be a big change in things in 2020, he was thinking positive. I think so too, but I see it as negative.

What I see is that the Atlas operating certificate is going to be yanked by the Feds. What you are saying is exactly the same pattern that I saw at another airline that lost their operating certificate after a fatal accident - also a cargo airline. That airline's management behavior was EXACTLY as what you have outlined about Atlas.

With everything that is going on in the industry safety wise, there is a good possibility that Atlas will be the sacrificial goat, being that the overall economic impact of their shutdown will be minimal compared to that of a major passenger airline.

Takes about a year, before the FAA takes definitive action. Give it a little time.

Atlas management sees themselves as being impervious, their actions are hubristic. Right now they don't see the jeopardy, it might be right around the corner.

Nope, not gonna happen, keep dreaming.

I swear, the fantasies pilots come up with these days have me replacing my keyboard every week.

At the end of my tenure at Atlas I noticed that we were checking out pilots who could barely speak English... I noticed that most of them struggled in the cockpit. It wouldn't shock me if that gets a 2nd look going forward as well.

If they keep totaling airframes (the 767 incident from last year might have been a hull loss) then they won't need to worry about the FAA. They won't be able to insure their fleet.

641 is back flying.

That is marginally more believable than the other pipe dream but still just as unlikely - unless it turns into a monthly thing.

We'll wait and see the final report from the NTSB on the Anahuac crash. Then we'll see what the widow of the jumpseater gets. I know what my wife would be asking for.... Atlas won't have a problem as long as the incidents stop.