WARNING!! MASSIVE THREAD CREEP!
@ scanscanscan,
for god's sake if you have so little confidence in your handling abilities that you believe a visual to be so hazardous then by all means don't be doing them! There are some decent risk management metrics you can apply to visuals just like any other procedure: day/night? familiarity with aerodrome? tune/ident the ILS for the appropriate runway and so on. Pretty basic stuff, or has the automagic and EK's pathological fear of flying the aircraft, and practising things like VNAV apps, gotten to you? There's a reason why visualsa are permitted with strict conditions in the FOM!
The GF A320 is a complete red herring, unless you're to suggesting that a 360 at less than 1000 AGL at night over unlit featureless water is a normal, accepted maneuvre on a visual. Besides, everything about that incident screams CRM disaster, nothing to do with being visual anyway.
Ok back to your regular programming...err...what were we talking about again? Ah yes...GLA...lovely place, wonderful people. Why I remember this one lass I met there, wee little slip of a thing...