Originally Posted by
T28B
But since you don't know, any harangue on this as the causal factor - that is the problem we are dealing with in trying to keep this discussion professional - is a case of jumping to conclusions.
With respect to your experience, there is a chance that the forensic based investigation may or may not prove this consideration to be valid.
And we still don't know whether or not they put the gear down before the first approach.
FFS, how about we work with the basics and then climb up the causation tree. (And for all I know, you may be right!)
To put this in perspective: I had a pilot in our multi crew aircraft (a great many years ago) who - a pilot who was not Muslim nor observing Ramadan - get a bit strange on me during a night flight due to him being mildly hypoglycemic.
Negligence on his part for not taking care of an issue (diet) that he knew about ahead of time.
Different root cause, same result: he was useless to me. (Yes, he got a piece of my mind once we got back to terra firma)
How may accident investigation boards have you been on?
It's bloody hard work.
And it is the unfortunate thing on this forum that happens every time there is an aircraft incident in a non-western country that culture is always raised as a cause, with the barely concealed bias that the culture is inferior when it comes to safety. Not only do people start making baseless assumptions that there is a cultural reason for the accident they start proselytising based on that assumption. But when pilots in the west nearly land on taxiways it's a matter of fatigue and poor situational clues, for example.
There are potential culturally-influenced dietary risks all over the world, such as alcohol and drug consumption or dieting for cosmetic reasons in the west. The issue of saving face is always raised, like a mantra that every asian person is obsessed with saving face, and there are never people in the west who want to save face. You don't have to look very far to see some very prominent western leaders spending most of their public life trying to save face. And the other issue that is always raised is power gradient in the cockpit, when we know some of the most significant disasters in western cultures involved causal factors that were the result of power gradient problems. Some or all of these factors may have played a part in this instance, but none of us know if any of them are relevant.