I have to plead guilty not to having read in full all of the last few pages of posts, as many of them seem at first glance to be attempting to come up with plans of varying usefullness to avoid a repetition of exactly the same situation that the crew of EK407 encountered that fateful evening.
Shoot me down in flames if what follows deserves it, but I believe the ATSB report will come out with recommendations that look beyond this 'shut the stable door behind the bolted horse' approach. It's been said before, but I believe it's worth repeating: no one out there - at least no one who holds an ATPL (I hope that's not too cryptic for most Sandpit readers) - believes for one moment that the crew set out that night not to follow SOPS.
(Again, as someone has said before me), one of the more likely findings will be that they were interrupted during some stage of their crosschecking and (perhaps, in some readers' opinion, unforgivably) neglected to go back and re-do the procedure from the beginning.
With that (as yet unconfirmed) scenario in mind, perhaps we should be looking at 'a fix' that covers more pitfalls than just the one this particular crew encountered. Maybe a sterile cockpit (i.e., a locked cockpit door) during the three or four minutes that the initial briefing and preparation of takeoff figures are done?
Anyone with five sectors of line experience will know it's highly impractical to suggest this sterile cockpit could be imposed later in the pre-departure sequence (i.e., the twenty-five minutes leading up to pushback). However, it, or something along similar lines, might be worth considering earlier in the pre-departure sequence, immediately after the crew have set themselves up and the tech log review and the walkaround have been completed.
I know the final ZFW will not have arrived at that stage, and therefore the crew will not be able to come up with accurate RTOW figures, and I know a late runway change will throw such preparations even further out. However, using the expected takeoff figures would give the crew a ballpark figure arrived at in a relatively non threatening situation that could be compared with the final figures for a gross error check - and, perhaps even more importantly, it would allow a proper takeoff briefing to be conducted without interruption.
People far smarter than I am will come up with something, probably far more clever than what I've suggested above. I just hope it's something a little more all-encompassing than the knee-jerk procedure we've come up after EK407 that covers only the particular pitfall that caught out that crew.
I believe there'd be few line pilots who would not say that there are many more pitfalls out there waiting to catch out some other crew in the future, and many such pitfalls could be 'trapped' far earlier than they are by crews today if we reduced the interruptions and distractions crews endure as they do their takeoff preparations under the present set up.