Originally Posted by
Check Airman
-At 15nm to go, they were at 10,000ft at 250 kts. At that stage, a competent crew would see that they had excess energy. The last (only?) logical action of this whole sequence was the disengagement of the AP.
Really?! Their situational awareness was in the bin so the last thing they probably should do is disconnect the automatics. Except if it was done to briefly gain full speed brake authority (if they thought that would solve their problem - though here it clearly wouldn't have). If it was me, I'd be re-engaging the autopilot in that situation and certainly not considering taking it out. I realise that the result was a crash anyway, but the obvious problem was they were so fixated on making the runway from 10,000ft (or sooner?), manually flying would fill up their capacity bucket even further and for such an un-current pilot (given covid) would surely make the situation far far worse.
If your situational awareness is low, the
logical action would be to do something to increase it, eg hand over control, increase the automatics or what they really should have done, is request an orbit or delaying actions to give themselves more time. The autopilot of a perfectly functioning aircraft does a very good job of helping you not to crash.
I'll open up a can of worms here, but before someone brings up the Children of the Magenta line video, I really don't think it applies here. There problem was a loss of SA and resultantly, capacity. The PF was so focused on the PFD that he couldn't even hear the TOO LOW GEAR call outs.