Spuds McKenzie, with all due respect, I do believe the DHL/Sibair was extremely unfortunate, because nothing does change overnight in the real world. I wish it did, I wish we had a magic ball and could see which of the hundreds of incidents would have an imminient reoccurrances and which incidents were actually caused by the first prime suspect and which corrective actions don't have any unfavourable consequences themselves! I'm not condoling this delay, just putting a real world slant on the situation. There are hundreds of incidents similar to this. AeroPeru 757 off Lima in 1996 could of been avoided if the Birginair recommendations were implemented sooner, not to mention the ADs that leave aircaft flying for years with faulty equipment, eg: MPET lining, found to be a major contributing factor of the Swissair MD11 fire, is still in many aircraft worldwide, as the AD gives until 2005 for its replacement to be installed, and many airlines have asked for extensions. I could go on and on.
Yes we can and should lobby the powers to be to accomplish these tasks in a quicker fashion, but we know that this costs and these costs are pushed down the ladder to the passenger, which the airlines hate! But in the real world we can accomplish a safer enviroment by us ALL operating in a 100% correct manner, especially when it comes to TCAS.
One common misconception with TCAS is that it only gives you 1 RA aircraft at a single time. It does not, you can have and it can display more than one RA at the same time (think of all those formation military fast jets out there). Therefore to say we didn't follow the RA because we had visual contact with the RA, is wrong because the second RA will collide with you 1 second later and you will never see it, possibly even not on TCAS if you are preoccupied with scanning the horizon for the first RA!
So my point still stands. As pilots what we can do is our jobs 100% correctly. Repond to all RAs! We don't have an option anymore, there are no exceptions and if we all act the same then the system will work. Its that simple!
Correction, to my previous post, RA functions are not given below 900 feet on the approach.