Originally Posted by
HeliComparator
Your individual points are all valid of course, but I come to a different overall conclusion.
Yes of course the pilots should have been monitoring the airspeed more closely. But as I have intimated, humans make mistakes and the whole point of SOPs and multi-pilot ops is to reduce the severity of a mistake to the point that it becomes inconsequential. Nor is it “back and white” - yes lots of people including this crew, had made approaches along the same lines without incident. But that doesn’t really matter. The question should be, were the SOPs and MCC reasonably optimal to prevent a mistake from becoming catastrophic - that being the duty of an operator, surely? I suggest the answer is No.
(Bold added for emphasis)
If
both pilots aren't doing their job, then SOPs are irrelevant. In this case, as recently brought up, the PF wasn't abiding by SOPs anyways as both crew had their heads out of the cockpit simultaneously.
I feel like we all agree that the SOPs
could have been better - I'm yet to see someone make a claim to the contrary, but while I believe that the crew's performance on this approach
most likely would have led to an accident regardless of the SOPs, I get the impression that you seem to believe that with both crew staring out of window and no eyes on the flight parameters, that a different set of SOPs would have stopped them from hitting the water.
I concede to your point (highlighted in
bold),
maybe with different automation guidelines they might have been able to pull it out of the bag once the EGPWS starting howling if the IAS had been kept above ETL by virtue of different SOPs, but I believe to say that the crew were simply victims here is going too far. As crab stated, they were negligent. Not
wilfully, but negligent in their responsibility as flight crew members nonetheless.