We are still only talking about 2013 - only 7 years ago in the familiar environment of the N Sea.
Can you really be serious that training, checking and SOPs were still inadequate to prevent this accident only 7 years ago?
If that were really the case there would have been far more incidents and accidents since IMC approaches are normal fare for aviation in those parts.
That hasn't happened - or has been well covered up - so you can only draw the conclusion that, whilst not perfect, the training, checking and SOPs were adequate for the vast majority of pilots on the vast majority of days.
There was nothing special to differentiate this flight from thousands of others - EXCEPT they crashed by the simple action of failing to notice the IAS on an instrument approach - not 10 or 20 kts missed and a correction made, but all the way to below 30 and VRS.
Do explain how that is not negligent.
I'm not trying to crucify them - I don't know them nor the pax that died but I know where my sympathies lie in this sad case.
I do find it worrying that you have any involvement in training, you don’t seem to grasp the very basics of flight safety.
Firstly it is surely blatantly obvious to nearly everyone that the training, checking and SOPs were inadequate to prevent this accident. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have happened. To put it politely, “Duh!”.
Secondly you appear to have some fantasy that these things are black and white, or “binary” in modern parlance. Either something is safe, or something isn’t safe, adequate or inadequate. No middle ground. Which I find amazing and scary.
With the training regime extant at the time, people were accustomed to flying an onshore NPA in various different ways with various different upper mode engagements. There was no standardisation simply because there was no laid down standard to adhere to. Yes Ok nearly everyone coped with that, but being accustomed to using VS mode during an NPA with speed reduction was an accident waiting to happen. So not surprisingly it eventually did happen when the cheese holes lined up, especially when there was no proper stabilised approach policy either.
Of course they made a mistake and failed to control and monitor the speed. But we need to bear in mind that humans (of which group most pilots are allegedly a member) make mistakes. They do, so get over it! (Apart from you, obviously). Because we know that humans make mistakes we need to design error-tolerant procedures so that when they do make a mistake, and they will, it isn’t catastrophic.
Hmmm, let me think how could we make flying a NPA error tolerant in terms of airspeed control? Oooh, I know, let’s make the pilots use IAS mode! There, the problem is solved in an instant and the accident won’t happen again. Quite easy really, wasn’t it! Just a pity the company’s SOPs didn’t require that and lots of people were in the habit of not doing so. That cost 4 lives.