Remoak,
I was assuming the crew were operating on QNH, maybe I'm wrong about that. Sorry if I am. If they operated QFE then it really is simple math I would agree.
If it is QNH then your math is wrong, with a runway elevation of 763' that is what the altimeter will read on touchdown, give or take a smidge. Add 3900 for 13nm times 300 and you get 4663. In this case you will perhaps see my point as you appear to have made the wrong calculation while in a very benign non time critical environment. Again sorry if I am mistaken re QNH/QFE.
In Europe we do operate QNH. At Geneva on the Vor/Dme they only publish check altitudes on the plate every 2nm so you have to interpolate somewhat. I write the check altitudes out longhand on a seperate peace of paper so I have a profile check every nm. That is after personal experience when under pressure the old grey matter started to fail me. I've seen the same thing happen to lots of people with the resultant poor tracking of the vertical profile.
I do agree that the most effective way of preventing this kind of incident is effective crosschecking and crew co-ordination. Currently in my company the only formal profile check required on an ILS is the approach fix which usually occurs at around 4 Dme. We pactise constant descent approach's so rarly intercept the glide from platform. That said lots of 3 times table involved in manageing that profile so generaly good awareness of profile at glideslope intercept. Once capture occurs I would surmise most people trust the kit and indications subject to either a visual or instrument crosscheck at the appropriate point. I would like to hope that I would notice an unusually high rate of descent coupled with speed runaway and either check at that point or go-around but having flown and instructed on a wide variety of aircraft in both the military and commercialy people do not always react as they might hope they would or think they would or as quickly as they or I would like. Hence my desire to learn from the shared experience rather than see people tut tut at the crew.
At many airfields you can encounter strong tailwinds down the approach. Alicante Rwy 10 and Malage Rwy 13 spring to mind. At glideslope intercept the aircraft pitchs to follow the glideslope. Often the autothrottle does not quite move quickly enough so with a tailwind the speed can start to runaway a bit. People solve this in different ways, speedbrake, intermediate flap to fully deploy the leading edges, gear down or a combination thereof. This of course leads to a higher than normal rate of descent while the aircraft sorts itself out. Something akin to this is maybe what initially misled the f/o/crew ?.
A few years ago we gave crews an unflagged failure of the PF's attitude indicator while in the sim. It would lock at say 15 degrees bank angle a bit nose up in the climbout, IMC of course, just as he rolled out of a turn. All very amusing until one crew crashed and several had to be rescused by the PM. If we re-ran this incident as a sim scenario I wonder how many crews would perform as well as this one ?
I