Originally Posted by
Capn Bloggs
Sailvi767, you're doing nothing more that Monday-morning quarterbacking. To say "yes, we're below 900ft so it won't give us a RA so let's get out of here" is totally unrealistic in these circumstances. Statements like "Watching an aircraft track in on a collision course and doing nothing takes a lot of courage." are just nonsense, in that, of course it would take a lot of courage and no-one in their right mind would do that in a normal situation, cruising along higher up. But these guys were 500ft off the water, at night, manoeuvring to a late-change final approach.
This. First of all.
Then second, Monday-morning quarterbacking, second-guessing, is one of media-saturated contemporary life's unfortunate and unpleasant irritants, and here is especially unwarranted. As one of this forum's usual suspects for legal aspects and issues, I will go further and say that even a thousand hours of Monday morning signal-calling will never, in this accident, show negligence of the two lost - senselessly lost - professional pilots.
The 1969 film "Z", directed by Costa-Gavras, depicts "a thinly fictionalized account of events surrounding the assassination of [a] democratic" European politician (from Wikipedia). The action centers on the work of a dedicated magistrate conducting the investigation. One hopes the DoT Inspector General staff will present such a dedicated person to examine how, for example, the helicopter route structure could have been thought to have been constructed safely. The film strikes this observer (I have no professional or otherwise occupational role in this accident) as relevant, inasmuch as "Z" was a slogan meaning, "He lives." A professional pilots forum could do worse for an overall attitude toward the CRJ pilots. . . . .Though with hope for a far more honorable epilogue to this investigation than occurs in the film.