Let's use the AAIB report to look at that - how a 10,000 hour commander and a 3000 hour co pilot flew the aircraft (perfectly serviceable) into the sea.
So a bit of a cockpit gradient - stuff you learn about in CRM, HF and MCC training.
poor instrument scan - highlighted in other places in the report. Not something you would expect from an experienced commander.
so although the SOPs are not good, they weren't following them anyway.
now we are in the realms of basic instrument flying procedures.
the contributory factors are just that and smack of complacency with a routine task - the causal factors are just poor piloting.
You can defend them as much as you like HC, personally I feel very sorry for them, they will have to live with the consequences of their failures as a crew for the rest of their lives.
And, while it might surprise you that the MAA is as pink and fluffy as the CAA when it comes to not apportioning blame - this crew failed to do their job properly.
The aircraft was serviceable, the AP did exactly what is was asked to do, there was no other emergency or reasonable distractor to divert them from their task of either landing or going around at MDA/MAP.
You can call it what you like - but this was negligent operation of an aircraft.
But you still haven’t addressed the question of why those mistakes were made. As I mentioned earlier, not addressing that question is what kept accident rates high in the early days of commercial air transport. There was an accident, the pilots were at fault. End of. And then the same accident would happen sometime later. Pilots at fault. End of. Rinse and repeat.
Eventually (and many years ago for most people) it was worked out that this wasn’t a good way to carry on. One needed to examine why accidents happened, not just how they happened, if one wanted to improve flight safety.
Put it another way, by all accounts these pilots were pretty average in their apparent competence and diligence, right up to the moment they crashed. This despite 6 monthly checks lasting several hours, and, in the case of the copilot, a lot of time recently spent on training for the aircraft type and the role.
A layman looking at that information would surely say “well they seemed competent, they had all that training and checking, and yet the two of them jointly made fundamental errors that killed 4 people. If nothing changes, how can I have any confidence that the same, or similar, accident won’t happen again?“
Only someone totally entrenched in the status quo would fail to see that,