Originally Posted by
clubord
Respectfully, skill and judgement of pilots is gained from experience. A 200 hour pilot can just as easily put an Airbus in the trees as a Boeing.
I started my career in a CRJ with around 700 flight hours. Looking back now, that was dangerous. 200 hours is unimaginable in a B737, you're just a warm body working the radios with that experience level.
I'd call attention to the CI140 crash at NGO about 25 years ago, where a fairly junior FO (~1100 hours, flying with a more experienced captain, around 8k hours) was at the controls of an A300-600R on approach in an augmented manual flying mode when an undetected error caused an unscheduled horizontal stab input, only this time to nearly nose-up. The cause of that accident was related to the flight crew's failure to diagnose and correct an erroneous automated control input (nose-up trim) following an undetected human error in a critical phase of flight, although problems with the flight control logic were pretty well-documented. That crew fought with the airplane to full-forward pressure on the yoke, which was producing level flight. An attempt to go around resulted in an upset from which they were unable to recover. Ironically, a software update was in the process of being rolled out that would have corrected the issue.
http://www.mlit.go.jp/jtsb/eng-air_report/B1816.pdf
Reader's Digest version:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_140
The precise factual scenarios differ, but fundamentally, very little of this is unprecedented.