747 AKL Tailstrike
I am not in any way pointing the finger at any person involved in this unfortunate incident. However are we not getting to a position of relying far too much on automatic / computer generated data and accepting that data as gospel. In my many years flying, like a lot of us I suppose, I operated electric / glass flight deck jobs as well as the steam driven machines. Yes you accepted the computer / automatic generated data for what it was, but before any figures were calculated and inserted into the systems, you most certainly ran a manual check of the figures, just to be sure.
I do accept that the F/D involved in this incident were recently off the A340 where normal ZFWs / TOWs etc would have been less than the 747.However I would still have expected one of the three guys on the flight deck to have twigged that something was not right with the weights at the time. Easy to be critical and that is not my idea and I suppose we are all human after all.