When asked about the crew's training in an interview, company spokesman Steve Anderson said it was adequate. He also disagreed with the investigators' concerns about pilot fatigue.
"They'd had sufficient rest at different stages of the journey. It's as simple as that. We don't believe it played a role in the accident."
At the time of the crash, the crew had been on duty for 19 hours. The full trip would have been 30 hours, Mr. Fowler said.
Anderson states that as his pilots killed themselves after only 19 hours into a rostered 30 duty, it doesn’t count as fatigue-related.
One is led to speculate that if they had instead killed themselves on landing after 30 hours of duty that Anderson would also claim likewise that it would not qualify as been fatigue-related?
It would be a great shame for the aviation community not to learn the salient lessons from this accident and the tragic waste of human life in just attributing it to “Poor Training” and which might merely be corrected by the operator entering the following amendment into the Ops Manual:
“Don’t forget to input the new takeoff data into the computer; otherwise it will default to the last entered data for the previous takeoff”.
If you scratch the surface of any airline that rosters 30-
hour duty periods you will find a lot of dirt under your fingernails.