Dogimed
No aircraft is designed to crash. The point here is that the aircraft crashed because the pilot didn’t understand how it worked. It’s just a shame that the investigation was clouded by misinformation and alleged corruption regarding the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. The reality is that he was below 100 ft AGL and below the tree line, at a very low speed with idle power and at a very high AoA. If he was relying on α Floor to kick in at α Prot then he didn’t understand the system.
Worse than that, the Captain had never been there before and the whole flyby was completely unplanned and adhoc. No safety brief prior to the pass.
The aircraft was "allowed" to descend below the safe height by innatention and poor oversight of the conditions and locality.
If a C150 got into those conditions it too would probably have come unstuck let alone a hundred and sixty tonne airliner with turbines that need spooling up.
Actually, it's a tribute to the aircraft that the casualty list was so low....but then most of the pax were journos and probably expendable
