Originally Posted by
MemberBerry
Until we get the final reports from the investigating teams, it's the other way around: WE don't know exactly what those crews were doing.
I'm not saying those pilots didn't make mistakes, it's quite possible they did, after all it was a stressful and confusing situation. It would actually be surprising if they did everything perfectly.
But so far I didn't see any evidence suggesting a training deficit of those pilots, compared to pilots from other airlines. If that's true, it means it is not impossible this could have happened to pilots from US or European airlines. There are even some people that claimed it couldn't have happened to European and US crews, because of their better training. I think we don't have enough evidence, and it's way to early for such claims.
I think that point of view is exactly right. More importantly even than to know
what those flight crews were doing is to make a useful theory of
why they did what they did. After we figured out what they did, which should be relatively straightforward from the recordings.
The very few cases of suicide notwithstanding, it is practically always the case that to professional operators suffering an accident (pilots, ship captains, train drivers, excavator operators, chemical plant engineers, ...) what they were doing made sense at the time. Only with hindsight does it seem obvious that it was wrong, and once we know the "correct" solution it seems impossible to miss. But we cannot really evaluate the situation they were in at the time.
I hope Professor Dekker won't mind if I use a small picture from his highly recommended book
The Field Guide to Understanding "Human Error" (quotes original) to illustrate:
(2009 Sidney Dekker)
Bernd