Saddest day in European ATC for decades.
Our thoughts should be for the poor guy that was alone on that frequency that night, (his life as he knew it is gone, we all know this), and for the parents of those that perished , mostly children whose lives were taken by a sequence or errors.
Warning my friends, do not jump to conclusions on the Russians.
from my info, the TU154 crew spoke very good english ( confirmed by the previous controllers in EDDM )was RVSM ( confirmed by the overfly over Linz HMU an hour before ) and according to Eurocontrol database was one of the few TU154s equipped with TCAS.
The poor guy in LSZH was alone and the main system was in maintenance, therefore probably no OLDI as well as no STCA, verbal coordinations / estimates etc.. you get the picture.
The " unhautorised break " of the second guy is bull**** . Everyone that makes night shifts knows what Imean.
Now the rest below is speculation from my part :
For me this could be another TCAS induced error, where one pilot got an RA, the other got an opposite RA but which was conflicting with the (possibly emphatic )ATC clearance received.If traffic info was passed ( looks like it ) the russian pilot might have diregarded the Climb coordinated RA he probably received.
If you were in the TU 154 captain seat and had made visual with the 757, and got an ATC clearance to descent immediately, would you be 100% sure you would have reversed the manoeuvre on account of a TCAS RA ?
Anyway the main result of this is that in a few months or years a young guy will find himself in front of a judge , with 70 families of those who died in the room, and he likely will go down , failed by a system and his bosses. That makes me feel extremely bad.
The one that has never sat alone on a postion a night can throw the first stone....