Flydubai flight 981 is one of the latest major accidents in 2016 that will probably point to a decades long problem in aviation.As it is way too early to even make assumptions as to what brought down this state of the art airplane, there are some strong indications there was strong negligence and bad decision making from the part of the pilots. One of the first indications is that the pilots were holding for two hours waiting for a windows of good weather to land at the Rostov-on-Don Airport in Russia which never came, taking into consideration that another flight tried for 3 times unsuccessfully to land in this airport and then diverted! As the plane made its second approach it initiated a go-around procedure which in simple terms means the pilots after breaking from the clouds they couldn't see the airport and had to abandon the approach and try again!after this attempt though it seems that the plane entered a low altitude stall which was as seen from the multiple videos unrecoverable at that point.Another factor that probably contributed to this accident was that the crew was fatigued from working too many hours per week (again all these are personal assumptions and opinions and do not reflect at all the real reason of this accident,for this we'll have to wait a few months for the official report).
If the assumptions i made above as per the reason of this accident are true we see a dangerous pattern of accidents where pilots simply can't handle basic flying skills and procedures such as how to recover from a stall or understand the limitations of the technology and automation of the cockpit. A few recent examples are Air France Flight 447, Air Asia flight 8501,Asiana flight 214.In all of these flights we see the dangerous trend of how bad pilots react to a simple problem such as a high altitude stall or loss of an airplane system which shouldn't cause an accident in any other situation but the pilots of those specific flights seemed to be overwhelmed by the unfolding situation and simply reacted badly leading to the loss of the plane crew and passengers.
Automation plays a major role in today's aviation world but when things start to fail in the cockpit then we see the real situation, which is that flight crew is unable to respond to basic flying skills which are taught from the beginning of their flying career!
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flydubai_Flight_981
http://avherald.com/h?article=495997e2&opt=0
https://www.rt.com/news/336514-flydubai-pilots-fatigue-crash/
