Very very sad and like almost all such major disasters a combination of things that have ben building up ... sometimes over years just waiting to come together all at once. And how tragic that a couple of seconds early crew reaction or a lower berm would have made such a difference.
I spent late Friday night reading the report with a deepening sense of forboding as I went through it.
One question comes to my inexperienced mind and I ask this as a simple Cherokee driver who has no experience of heavy metal.
Whatever the computed take off figure given, does not something in the experienced 747 pilots mind say that if a lightly loaded 747 rotated at 130 knots then that cannot be the same figure for a heavily loaded one ? What we all call a gross error check but one the brain carries our automatically.
Wouldn't the incorrect bug speeds and low EPR number have stuck out like a sore thumb?
Or are we simply being told that this was the insidious efect that fatigue had - a lack of "alertness".