lederhosen, whilst not disagreeing with your view (#2628), I would question the implied context and assumptions.
How is knowledge of ‘the basic stuff’ acquired?
How do pilots know that the thrust lever is at idle – ‘hands on’ experience providing a geometric feel for position and motion? How often do pilots look at the engine instruments during an approach, if so what is normal, and in what circumstances?
The point is that these aspects (of skill) are acquired over time and require focussed effort. Scan patterns are developed, how and when to share tasks understood, and what the approach norms are for a range of circumstances – experience – pre packaged solutions retrieved from memory. The issue is how and when the solutions are placed in memory and if they can be retrieved.
Two of the crew were undergoing training, most likely without all of these skills or knowledge. Thus they would have to allocate considerable attention to the learning / understanding processes. They didn’t know what was ‘normal’; they had to deduce this from first principles, from basic training. There was little or no time, or spare attention to see, identify, and understand ‘minor’ abnormalities, probably not able to relate a RA malfunction (even if seen) to the consequences of autothrust mode change. Imagine the likely thought patterns; providing ‘retard’ was seen (annunciation or thrust lever motion) – “why is that occurring now”, “have I made a mistake, what, where, why … ”.
The captain could suffer similar limitations of attention, and although having the required experience, knowledge and skills, his task and workload in supervising both crew and aircraft reduced his attentional capacity. His first thoughts – assuming ‘a problem’ was seen, “what’s this guy done now; that shouldn’t happen, why, what does it mean …”. Thus all of the crew quite understandably could be ‘maxed out’ – behind the aircraft.
This is not excusing the crew, not that from a human factors view that any excuse is required, but to place them and ourselves in the context of the accident and not ‘as now’ with hindsight.
We should recall our memories of the first training flight to a major airport, the first real operational use of the autos, IFR to autoland, perhaps struggling to understand, wanting to learn, not wishing to suffer an error, particularly when observed by another trainee.
A go around at a sensible point – I agree. The evidence suggests that this point was identified late on and the manoeuvre commenced by instinctively pushing the thrust levers forward (late but not necessarily fatally so). Except in this instance the RA/auto system malfunction again retarded the thrust levers probably because the TOGA mode was not selected - an error or oversight in conditions of extreme pressure and stress.
No blame, just understanding, and the need both individually and collectively to learn from this – from the unfortunate experiences of others.