Notso fantastic, I start to believe that your chosen name suits your comments very well. I don't claim to be an expert nor I'm the most experienced pilot. Neither are you, your comments clearly show that. .
Regs make no allowance for pilots to take decisions on whether they 'think' it safe to continue. The whole point of technical development has been to make the system so reliable that when it goes off, you go 'off' UNLESS you are clearly above minimum safety altitude! It's a philosophy I trust, but the legions of 'shoot from the hip'
I am not a cowboy, so usually i don't shoot from the hip. Yes, technical development has been great lately. But if you think they never fail and give you absolute security, then you are fool. I just hope for you and your passengers, that you never get caught in situations, when you have a technical problem or similar and can't find an answer in your SOP. And trust me, (computer) systems can fail. Unoticeable.
I learned that yhe hard way during my Masters course in Information Technology... :o
I am not questioning safety procedures or regulations. But I strongly believe that not
every situation can be forseen or covered by regulations or SOP as bugg smasher or 411A pointed out correctly already.
Slickster, read again my example given on the previous page and tell me, do you honestly think a go around would have been the safest solution? And, no, the altimeters were setting correctly, it is just that some airports out there in Indonesia don't have instrument approaches to all runways and windconditions on some runways are a bit tricky, so you better chose a visual approach. Believe it or not, but on some you have a 'real' GPWS warning and when you forget to turn into final from base, you will be very close to the mountain indeed. I have to explain that, because I also found it hard to believe the first time I landed there: Some of the airports were built by the Japanese at war time and they built the airports in a way to be hard to attack, usually built very close to mountainous area.
So, slickster or notso fantastic, what would you do, lets say after diversion on minumum fuel? Indonesia consits of many islands and the next suitable airport could be too far away. Fly an instrument approach with no GPWS warning but a tailwind exceeding your SOP- and airplane limitations or fly a visual approach with a GPWS warning and pull up everytime and run out of fuel? Decissions, decissions...