My personal opinion is a Pan Pan call is generally more appropriate with an engine shutdown in a twin rather than a May Day call.
Whatever, it doesn't really matter. A PAN is more correct but either will immediately remove any requirement for the PIC to observe any rule or procedure, which is the point I was making.
My guess is the PIC, considering the nature of the problem at the time decided BK was more suitable.
Yes I think we all agree on that, the main debate is over whether you should EVER abandon a perfectly good runway underneath you for a more convenient one some distance away. I don't think that you should, simply because if you go for the one beneath you, the chances or crashing are very close to zero. If you go for the distant runway... you might make it, you might not. Why risk it? There is really only one answer to that question, and we all know what it is... and it starts with a "c"...
I think we all need to put ourselves in his shoes and imagine for a minute how we would have handled the situation knowing what he knew at the time rather than what we know now.
My point is that it shouldn't even be a question of that. Prudence demands that you take the SAFEST POSSIBLE course of action AT ALL TIMES. If you always do that, none of this stuff ever needs to be discussed, and two people would be alive right now.
Remember we are talking about fog here not mist and all that it entails with regards to horizontal visibility.
Mist is a complete no-brainer. Fog might be an issue if the vis was, say 50m, but it wasn't, it was 300m. You should be able to get a Mojave stopped in 300mm without too many problems. So what exactly is the issue? Even if - and it's a big if - you were to lose visual reference as you touched down, what is the worst that could happen? As opposed to what actually did happen in this accident? Even just watching the HSI should be enough to slow down safely without leaving the runway at Richmond... and that would only be necessary if you lost all visual reference... which simply won't happen in those conditions.