Originally Posted by SLFinAZ
From the report I got no sense of any command presence, no radio call, no briefing/statement of intent to the FO or LAME...I find that both confusing and disturbing.
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
-- Mike Tyson
We can plan for all sorts of eventualities. However as the report hints at, there may have been some underlying flight control issue (both pilots required for rudder input, taxiing off centreline, para 1.1.16
Preliminary report). Until the investigators get to interview the crew or find some other mechanical defect we just don't know. Were one, two or three issues with the aircraft (engine fire, flight controls and engine instruments)? Did the engine fire cause the control problem? We don't know.
However, what I can tell you is that simply hand flying an airworthy aircraft during normal manoeuvring a consumes a large proportion of cognitive resources. That is why we have two pilots and use the autopilot when things get busy. Hand flying whilst potentially having multiple confusing failures makes it very easy to get to cognitive overload. Once in that state we rapidly lose the ability to perceive what is going on around us, we don't hear, we don't see very well, and we load-shed tasks. But here is the kicker, we don't get to choose what tasks we drop, it just happens automagically.
So we can plan for all sort of things, then we get airborne and nothing happens the way we think it will. Modern certification standard ensure that you can get away from the ground under the prevailing conditions with a safe plan. But this wasn't a modern aircraft. You only need to look at the
list of Convair Accidents to see quite a number where people on the ground were killed people (five by my count). The inference is that many accidents happened as the aircraft simply could not out climb nearby populated terrain.