I stopped flying AF when they started flying perfectly good albeit temperamental airplanes into the ocean floor. If I wanted to assume that level of risk I'll take my chances on some fartbox submarine. The rigor of their pilot training has since been raised into question.
IIRC, they've since expanded their training to "the basics of flying a plane without the autopilot holding your hand" and "Here's how to not stall at 35,000 ft, and here's how to recover if you do."
The latter part about high-altitude stall recovery was, IIRC, previously absent entirely.
MH had a truly awful year that year, but it's hard to blame them for MH370 and certainly not for MH17. Besides that, I think their track record is on the better side among global airlines.
Yeah, Malaysian is not a bad airline. Both of those losses were really bad luck that could have, and have, happened to any airline.
Not just saying that, I've flown with them twice over the last year and another booked in a few months. After SingAir and maybe Thai, I think they're among the best in the region.
LionAir and AirAsia, on the other hand, I wouldn't get on even if their tickets were free...
Based on my reading of the wikipedia article, it doesn't seem pilot under-training was a factor. The lawsuits seem to have centered on improper maintenance by air france. Is there any reason that makes you think that air france pilots' training is particularly worse than the industry average? Sure, pilot error was a contributing factor in the crash but that's the case for many crashes, so much so that if that were a reason to rule out airlines there wouldn't be much airlines you could fly with.
The second half of this paragraph is pretty damning summary of the performance of the stick-holder (I can't even call him a pilot).
> In a July 2011 article in Aviation Week, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger was quoted as saying the crash was a "seminal accident" and suggested that pilots would be able to better handle upsets of this type if they had an indication of the wing's angle of attack (AoA).[264] By contrast, aviation author Captain Bill Palmer has expressed doubts that an AoA indicator would have saved AF447, writing: "as the PF [pilot flying] seemed to be ignoring the more fundamental indicators of pitch and attitude, along with numerous stall warnings, one could question what difference a rarely used AoA gauge would have made".[265]
I think there is a high percentage (probably a majority) of 15-hour, pre-solo student pilots who could have broken the stall of AF447 well above 30K feet.
> The pilot at the controls that night was Pierre-Cédric Bonin. Although he had clocked up many hours in an Airbus cockpit, his actual experience of manually flying a plane like the A330 was minimal. His role had primarily been to monitor the automatic system. The time he had spent manually flying would likely have been focused on take-off and landing. So, when the autopilot disengaged, because ice crystals had begun to form inside the air-speed sensors in the fuselage, he didn’t know what to do. The fly-by-wire system downgraded itself to a mode that gave Bonin less assistance. With the safety net gone, the plane was now liable to stall if conditions allowed, and Bonin inadvertently proceeded to create those conditions.
...
> The Air France 447 pilots ‘were hideously incompetent,’ says William Langewiesche, author of the Vanity Fair article
I'm struggling to understand how you came to this conclusion. I urge you to read the official report from the BEA (which is parroted in the Wikipedia article). The report clearly paints a very different picture, that of two highly credentialed imbeciles in the cockpit that bungled the response to a routine minor emergency and deviated from procedure (the captain was asleep with the younger copilot and a relief pilot at the controls). They subsequently forgot how to fly an airplane without automation (or never learned how), and made a series of unbelievable errors. The captain burst into the cockpit with just enough time to realize what had happened and curse them out in French (they were beyond the point of recovery and realized their fate) and the rest is history.
From the Wikipedia article:
On 17 April 2023, Airbus and Air France were both acquitted of manslaughter.
