Just a thought.
Captain Marty's decision - to attempt to make it to Le Bourget - is now being discussed in absolute terms - that his only choice should have been (insert favored selection here).
But those choices are all based on a balance of probabilities - they are not hard-and-fast, and the discussions of them here are being had by people who were not in his seat. He knew best what the a/c was doing, how it was responding, and so forth. And even his knowledge may have been imperfect, but what else was he to base his decisions upon?
As the Sioux City incident showed us, it is possible to snatch some measure of recovery from the very jaws of disaster.
And we should also not lose sight of the fact that, once he made his decision, subsequent failures (in machinery or crew) may have made it a poor one - in hindsight. But I've been in the cockpit of a Concorde, and I saw no crystal ball installed. What seemed like his best choice may have turned into his worst choice 30 seconds later, because of some other condition which he could not foresee and may not even have known about.
It's very easy to be dogmatic now, and say "well, he should have crash-landed it right there in a straight line, any other decision is moronic and shows that he was a crappy pilot." But it's pretty obvious from all the testimonials that he was, in fact, a very fine pilot.
Me, I'm just self-loading freight. But I think I want a PIC up at the sharp end who is flexible enough, in such a situation, to be able to consider his options, all of them unpalatable, and choose the one that he thinks, based on what he knows, is least likely to fry my sorry ass, and then try everything in his power to make it happen - and not simply say "well, statistically, the best thing to do is to crash land right now, so now we crash-land. That way, noone will be able to fault my good judgement at the inquiry."
The questions about equipment, take-off weight, FOD and all the rest, are an entirely different matter. Many of them were unknown and unknowable to the flight crew. But I think it's a very shabby deal to suggest tangentially, as some others have done, that the PIC made a poor decision about eg TOW, and that therefore all his other decisions were similarly poor.
JMHO
llater,
llamas