SaulG …Agreed.
punkalouver - I’d be pretty sure the availability of approaches played into this but what the incident crew were faced with wasn’t that unusual. I suspect many of us here have looked at NOTAMs and seen situations at destinations or alternates where due WIP you’ve potentially got no ILS, reduced landing distance and either no PAPIs or a temporary set..
At the end of the day a traditional non-precision approach is flyable in the 74 and routinely demonstrated on recurrent checks…In many instances LNAV can be used to assist the lateral tracking leaving a bit more capacity to handle the vertical profile using e.g. V/S.
As for VNAV - as I recall it on the likes of the 744/777 you weren’t allowed to build your own VNAV procedure, amending preprogrammed altitude constraints was not allowed.