Were I critiquing this accident giving a training session to instructors after watching this film my perspective in back engineering this woman's troubles would be geared more toward the macro than the micro involved with how this unfortunate incident ended.
When these things happen it's always a temptation to get right into the minutia seeking to find something in the details that we can then assign as either part of or directly to as the cause.
Quite frankly, in this film I see a great deal of concentration on the autopilot and its associated functions as a major issue involved with this accident. All this might be true but as instructors we should be looking deeper into what we are witnessing on our monitors.
After a lifetime spent analyzing aircraft safety and accident detail what I saw watching this film disturbed me as almost immediately I became aware that there was more to learn from this accident than the mistakes being made with the autopilot.
First of all, I am not now nor have I ever been a huge fan of allowing ANY third party activity in the cockpit while a dual session is active. This includes additional passengers in the plane and most certainly allowing the student to be filming the session with intent to publish the film on the internet.
With these factors in play there is no way to totally eliminate them as distractions. I won't delve deeply into the psychology involved here as it's quite complex and frankly beyond the intended scope of this post.
What I will say is that ANY activity not directly involved with the interface between instructor, student, and the aircraft contains huge potential to split the concentration of the student between several sources and this is NOT conducive to quality flight instruction.
In this film we see an instructor with a student who is having trouble understanding the functions of the autopilot. It is right here we see the need to examine the micos further.
Lesson plans need to be flexible and instructors need to be flexible. The instant while in flight the instructor notices that a student lacks working knowledge of a system that is a critical factor in the dual being given the instructor MUST depart from the lesson plan and solve that issue by a switch into remedial education to solve that missing factor in the equation.
If something of value can be taken from this unfortunate incident it has involve instructors taking a serious look at the instructor's role in this and what could have been done differently in how this student was handled from the very beginning.
Dudley Henriques