The Mentour Aviation YouTube videos, site, and Apps have gone from strength to strength, explaining to wannabe pilots and thousands of others all aspects of flying down to minor details such as why pilots pause for a moment at medium thrust before engaging takeoff thrust on departure.
They gave the impression MentourPilot was working as captain on a small airline based in Spain flying Boeing 737s.
It came as a nice surprise that on a flight to holiday in Thailand with his young son on Qatar Airways where the first leg to the Middle East was on the Airbus A350 and the second on the Boeing 787 MentourPilot dared say that he liked both aircraft but if anything he preferred the Airbus A350, perhaps because of the slightly wider diameter of the cabin. He was not saying anything that would deter people flying on the 787.
Sadly this was followed by a video saying that flying the route the opposite way starting with the 787 made him think differently. That was OK, but the rehashing and rehashing of features such as the auto-darkening windows seemed over the top.
I would not have thought any more about this blip except that he took down a video on the 737 MAX after a few hours not realizing the impact it would have when linked to Leeham News and his collaboration with its Bjorn Fehrm. The big boys had taken notice.
The written post remains and we had A LINK to it in our previous post (a video) entitled “Boeing between A Rock and A Hard Place” explaining grandfathering and the danger of a reprogrammed MAX crashing if MCAS failed to function if too many precautions against it not doing so when not needed.
There are many comments on the above Leeham News post which says MentourPilot took down the video on the advice of a colleague and not due to pressure from his airline. (MentourPilot said the same about his colleague) in a subsequent post of his.
Seeing how his subsequent coverage of the MAX is so over the top in favor of Boeing and the future MAX I decided to look further.
Far from working for a small airline operating out of Spain, MentourPilot is working at a Spanish base of the largest low-cost carrier in Europe. One that only flies Boeing 737s and has 110 orders for the MAX 200, a high-capacity version of the MAX 8, with options on 100 more! While the airline would be careful about applying direct pressure, the esteemed colleague who who exerted so much influence, might have been subject to it and anyway neither would have wanted to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
As an employee of such an airline it would be difficult for him to suggest that grandfathering has perhaps gone too far in the case of the 737 and that Boeing did not really want to go for the MAX in the first place.
Even so, to use his signature word, he usually does a “fantastic” job.