Originally Posted by
Uplinker
From the report it looks more like a rushed and impossible approach to me - especially with the reduced track miles. They were too close with too much energy to accept the shorter routing.
They then seem to have got into a right bugger's muddle with the 737 "automation" and were at least 10nm behind the aircraft - not a good place to be.
Whatever it was, it seems amazing that pilot recruitment these days concentrates on how many verbal reasoning and maths questions you can do in 10 minutes, and clever answers to HR questions, rather than being able to actually fly a plane with Situational Awareness.
The sudden cutting of track miles opening the door to the ensuing chaos was certainly a part of it. The blind, task-saturated FD following (in day VMC, at that) was another. Both were fully factors in their own right, and the importance of one does not diminish the other (as in "more like a..." comparison).
If they had a normal, calm approach then the whole event probably would not have happened, yes; but the underlying inability to break away from the FD would still be there, only hidden and waiting for some other triggering event.
It's disappointing but not surprising. The FD taboo is so pervasive that I remember one sim where we had a PRM breakaway, which is mandated to be hand-flown (at least for us) due to the time criticality. OK, we get the breakaway vector and I start flying it. Then some other radio-related stuff happens and the other pilot can't get to the FCP to set the heading bug and modes. I turn off the FD as it's a distraction making flying difficult (giving a full opposite turn indication, and the wrong vertical command as well), and the sim instructor scolds me for doing that and decreasing the available SA tools, or some similarly deranged take.