My heart goes out to the crew involved. No one makes deliberate mistakes in the cockpit. We all fly to the best of our abilities.
Nope, no one makes deliberate mistakes but sometimes action or inaction by the crew leads to them. Sometimes it is a reasonable mistake, sometimes not.
When the airline has a PIC with 3.5 hours sleep to their name there are more at fault than the crew (despite this being common from what I hear).
During the 36 hour lay-over? It helps if you go to bed.
The interim report said:
98.9 hrs in last 30 days, 229 in the last 90
Yep a hard month but 70/month over the last 3 including 4 Melbourne flights. That pairing leaves at 10am local is 28 hrs total flight time with 14 in a bunk pretty much on Dubai body clock time, and a 36hr layover; most guys bid for it because it is so benign. The onward flight to NZ done by the augment crew is much more tiring.
Thrust levers moved to the TOGA detent, aircraft passes end of runway 16.
The old timers and mil pilots talk about distance to go markers. The crew passed the 900m/600m/300m to go lights firmly attached to the ground but still did not select TOGA until off the end of the runway.
All facts above from the independent sources. Why not wait for the ATSB report and then judge whether it was a reasonable string of errors for the crew to make, whether they spotted any of the clues to their predicament and what other factors are involved. Maybe it wasn't the big bad airline that was at fault, maybe they contributed but blind defence of the crew is equally silly particularly based on a tabloid newspaper article.
The same thread has been going on in the ME forum forever.