@selah,
The modern role of a flight engineer is to do ground checks at the point of destination, if an airline has station engineers at the destination then most flights go without flight engineers!!!!

Well it seems we many never really know for sure what happened to KQ507 on that fateful day.

However am a firm believer things dont go wrong, BUT they start wrong and herein lies my issues!

* Why did KQ change their destination of training pilots from a world reknowned flight center in Ethiopia to SA? was it cost based or or is SA better or were Ethipia tired of the calibre of candidates been sent by KQ?

http://www.ethiopianairl...ools/pilot/default.aspx

http://www.flightacademy.co.za/

http://www.43airschool.com/

* The who's who seem to have a say in their pilot recruitment programme.

* The over-reliance on ex-airforce personell, have they been unable to make the transition smoothly to a modern private sector environment hence inablity to adapt the rigours of modern day corporates.

There seem to be a number of underlying issues and unless these are addressed then this will indeed happen again, however am no pilot, nor do i work in KQ am just an obesrver from outside.

Check this out;

"The Cameroon Civil Aviation Authority (CCAA) released its final report of the crash on 28 April 2010.[11] The investigation found that the aircraft departed without receiving clearance from Air Traffic Control. The captain, who was the flying pilot, corrected right bank several times after take-off. After 42 seconds of flight, the captain gave a command indicating that he activated the autopilot. However the autopilot did not actually engage, nor was the command acknowledged by the copilot. The pilots did not notice that the aircraft was increasingly banking to the right from 11° when the captain indicated that he had set the autopilot to 34° when a bank angle warning sounded 40 seconds later. The captain then activated the autopilot, but his inputs on the controls lead to a further increase in the bank angle. The aircraft pitched nose-down after it reached a height of 2900 feet with 115° right bank. The two pilots used opposite and conflicting control inputs to attempt to recover the aircraft. The aircraft crashed at 287 knots at 48° down pitch and 60° right bank 1:42 after take off.[33]

The CCAA determined the probable causes of the crash to be "loss of control of the aircraft as a result of spatial disorientation... after a long slow roll, during which no instrument scanning was done, and in the absence of external visual references in a dark night. Inadequate operational control, lack of crew coordination, coupled with the non-adherence to procedures of flight monitoring, confusion in the utilization of the [autopilot], have also contributed to cause this situation"


http://en.wikipedia.org/...Kenya_Airways_Flight_507