I must say I find it some what worrying that we have people who by their own admission are driving heavy iron (what I drive would come under the classification of extremely light to you guys) but don’t seem to have heard of the Reason model of accident causation. Here we have a pilot who has never flown the aircraft before, making a take off from probably the most demanding port on the network and things come unstuck. Rather than chiding them on the grounds of “airmanship” a less naive approach is to ask how an experienced crew, albeit in other types, came to grief. My reading of the report is that they were most professional in their handling of the flight, from the nose oleo extension and the take off brief as to what to expect ,to the handling of the subsequent emergency. One question I would ask of a psychologist is what role would the company’s continual tail strike message have to play in the event – over compensation by the pilot in its avoidance?
I find it interesting that D P Davies in “Handling the Big Jets” says……For psychological reasons even the final simulator check can never satisfactorily take the place of the aeroplane. It is particularly disturbing to read of those training organisations who are attempting to do virtually all training and testing on the simulator. It is also difficult to accept that pilots themselves will be satisfied with so little flight experience.
Might be a reason here to take a look at the Airbus common qualification perhaps.