[cmurf]

I don't consider it analysis. It is a discussion. He writes that Air France 447 was "an exercise in poor airmanship", full stop. That is completely inconsistent with the final report on AF 447, where literally everyone but the passengers got part of the blame for it. It blamed Air France, it blamed Airbus, it blamed the simulators, it blamed the pilots.

His central thesis in this article might be:

Boeing became the world’s pre-eminent commercial airplane manufacturer in part because it developed a coherent design philosophy that relied on pilots’ airmanship as the last line of defense.

And that's come up before in various discussions like Langewiesche's. And here I'll underscore this article is a discussion, it's not an analysis. He does bring in myriad relevant factors like airline's being cheap, foolhardy, downright wreckless at times, literally expecting pilots to paper over their decisions. I think that is a real problem all airlines have to contend with, but the safest airlines have mostly solved it, and the least safe airlines still struggle with it and it's mostly about systemic corruption, not pilot incompetency. It's just that if you don't have particularly skilled and experienced pilots all of the time, you're playing roulette - you don't have your last line of defense all of the time. Eventually, things aren't going to work out well. And on that part of the discussion, I agree with him.