One only has to read the accident report (dressed up admirably and easy to read in the Australian authorīs MaCarthur Jobs series of Air Disaster - or Air Crash books) on the Thai Inter A310 fatal accident into the mountains at Kathmandu. Briefly, the crew were initially distracted in the course of a straight in VOR/DME approach in IMC and with much uncertainty and cockpit flight management confusion elected to go around in the early stage of the approach and have another go. Although the missed approach procedure is quite complicated involving various radials before reaching a holding pattern, the crew flew in a circle quite different from the published missed approach procedure and spent an inordinate time heads down attempting to programme one waypoint which was out of sight on their MAP.
If they had simply observed the passage of a NDB needle and a VOR needle on their respective RMIīs it would have been readily apparent that the aircraft was at 10,500 ft tracking away from the airport into a 21,000 ft MSA.
But as often happens with glass cockpit operation the crew were automatic pilot monkeys who relied blindly on the MAP regardless of the appropriateness of such a situation.
I know of a highly experienced expatriate captain on contract to a European operator who was read the riot act by his chief pilot because some first officer had leaked the startling news that the expat pilot actually turned off the flight director in flight. The chief pilot (quite nicely, I might add), gently castigated the expat captain explaining that "Our first officers are not trained to monitor raw data flying - please stick to the full automatics."
