Originally Posted by
John Citizen
Because to fly it like a Cessna (just look outside at the runway only and just fly towards it heads up) is not relevant (for all those reasons I mentioned).
Maybe that's why the ATSB didn't even mention it.
Right, and again (you seem to have some difficulty grasping this) their woes began when they accepted the visual, approximately 10 nm out, within about 30 seconds of that point in time they were A: below normal profile, B: configured with gear down and at least the first increment of flaps, and C: Descending huckety-buck toward the floor of the CTA. So everything you typed about speed limits, the need to configure, the need to remain on profile, the difficulty of simultaneously descending and slowing, the challenge of configuring the airplane, structural speed limits, company speed limits, ATC speed limits, the difficulty of having to maintain a minimum thrust setting on descent, the need to be on profile at 1000 ft, the requirement to land in the touchdown zone; All of that has exactly zero relevance to the incident under discussion. This wasn't a case of being to high and too fast and being unable to get configured and on profile. It's actually the opposite problem, being far too low for where they were relative to the airport, and not suspecting it.
My assumption is that at the point they accepted the visual, that they had the airport in sight. According to the ATSB report they
reported that the runway was in sight. Is that not true? If it *is* true, why did they lose SA due to being absorbed in programming the FMS to navigate them to a runway they could see? If it is *not* true, why did they say it was? Seems like if they *had* been looking at the runway, it would have occurred to someone that, hey, that runway is a long way away and it doesn't really *look* like we're high on profile, why are we rocketing downward at almost double our normal descent rate? Certainly if someone had been keeping an eye on the DME, they might have twigged that descending through 2600 ft above the airport, at -1400 ft/min. was maybe a little below profile for being 10 miles from the runway. Instead, they were diving to catch a descent-path indicator which was commanding them to be at 1800 ft above the airport, 9-10 nm away because it was programmed for something other than what they were doing.