Assumptions, such as the assumptions about experience and alertness above are often at the root of accidents.
Questions to be answered:
- was the FO sufficiently ‘experienced’ (training) to deal with an unusual abnormality? Consider if it was his first flight into Europe, first into AMS with an unfamiliar chart, with minimum English language, etc; then his workload / capacity for attention might be at a minimum.
- did the TC over-focus on the autos, was he trouble-shooting another problem, coaching, etc; e.g. why couldn’t the FO select a dual approach (a resultant of the RA fault). Thus was the TC ‘out of the loop’, something that might be tolerated with a balanced crew, and which could have been achieved with a ‘qualified’ P3, but apparently this was not P3’s task.
While we ‘wait and see’, consider the plea to ‘fly the aircraft’, but exactly how should we be flying, how is this taught, and what is the required experience for a line training operation.
One safety defence against the hazards of unusual / abnormal situations is not to expose a training flight to such situations, which in this instance appears to be the high energy approach set up. What ever the cause of this situation, the acceptance of an unstabilised approach during a training flight is a definite No No.
But then again which crew member would have had spare capacity to detect the unstabilised approach – issues of workload again – a training flight. In these situations even more thinking ahead is required, thus can we detect that an approach will become unstabilised before a check ‘gate’? But that’s what experience is about – was the TC that experienced?