Having read the report, I’m finding it difficult to understand how the situation was allowed to develop for as long as it did. I’m also sure that the crew did not set out to have an incident like this either, so there should be some learning points we can take away?
It is not normal on any departure to start descending soon after takeoff, unless something is going badly wrong. This seems to have been missed/ignored for what is a considerable length of time, given the ~1s reaction time we are meant to have approaching V1 and the initial climb out being what most would call a critical flight phase. All I can think of is that the PF/PM relationship broke down to the extent that no-one was actually minding the shop and/or projecting forward the aircraft trajectory. If the GPWS hadn’t gone off, one wonders how low they would have got or even worse.
Were they uncomfortable with what the aircraft was doing or was it only brought to their attention by a warning system? I fly a fairly computerised plane (777) but those first couple of minutes after departure you are concentrating hard on basic data and what the automatics are doing plus what modes they are in. I’d love to know what distracted the crew on this flight enough to end up in this situation, so I can avoid it myself...