DIBO;
Allow me to correct you, and which will make the investigation even more complex: "The ultimate cause of this disaster is the pilot flightcrew failing to follow ATC instructions"
If I understand what you are trying to convey correctly, this is a mindset/ opinion that I am seeing more and more over the last decade and it erodes flight safety. What is the purpose of the correction you have made? Is it to transfer or smooth out the responsibility of the Captain? To spread it over ‘ the flight crew’ rather than have it just sit with the Captain? There is a very good reason that the Captain is responsible for the safe outcome of the flight. If we start diluting the responsibility of the Captain with attitudes like that the behaviour of Captains starts to change. It is very important that the Captain of a ship or aircraft feels ‘wholly responsible for the safe outcome of the flight’.
The very fact that the Captain is wholly responsible is what creates clear cut safety related decision making. It is human nature that makes this so and the reason why, whenever we have high consequence environments, we have one person who carry’s the can, not a committee, not a round- table, one person.The weight of that responsibility is what allows difficult decisions to be made quickly and with conviction.
I may have misunderstood what you were trying to point out by changing pilot to ‘flight crew’. Please correct me if it wasn’t meant as a dilution of responsibility.