#267 - Good morning Dan. OK yes I was a bit harsh on the TSB, they did have very little to go on really. However, "Findings as to risk" is their term not mine, and they seemed to be a bit selective in picking up St. Maarten's non-compliance with ICAO but not Canada's! Interestingly it appears that Westjet added the recommendation to go consider going around if the runway is not visible 1/4 mile before the MAP - which pretty much WOULD meet the Annex 6 requirement in this case.
I'll also concede that in this instance a different procedure (PiCMA) would have been less likely to have affected the outcome here than in the Halifax accident, where it would have had a very high probability of preventing it. But it might have given the landing pilot more time to interpret the cues at the MDA, and put more emphasis on subsequent instrument monitoring by the Captain to pick up the pitch change, increased RoD and decreasing rad alt, rather than (apparently) being both head up to the exclusion of almost everything else .
FD, I'm not sure quite sure what the relevance of your (interesting) reference article is - is it that experience is no protection against plan continuation bias and getting sucked into increasingly bad situations? That is certainly a major human flaw - as is the tendency to get task fixated and tunnel vision and all the rest of it. Since we certainly haven't succeeded in growing or training ourselves out of it, surely we still need to use other defences against it, e.g. by more appropriate procedures. Similarly, nothing's changed about the fact that weather is not actually 100% predictable, communications aren't 100% reliable, facilities aren't 100% working, etc., etc. Surely all operations should be based on being prepared for the worst every time - these guys were going to a holiday resort where the weather's pretty near perfect most of the time, but things ganged up on them and they came scarily close to ending up in the water.
PEI is absolutely right that there are lots of pious platitudes about urging pilots to "monitor better" but precious little actual practical action on what that involves, both physically or psychologically. OK, we shouldn't expect that from an accident report, but we do need to take a serious look at why these things are still happening.