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Old school here again.
In your super-side-stick airbus of tomorrow, that I'm always told is so advanced and superior to older models, do we not pan the radar on the mountains anymore? I always did on the A310's and A300's. I used to fly into volcanic rock bowls, and would manually point the antenna tilt down to see bright red where the rocks were.
Why wasn't this crew doing this? Why aren't you doing this? I'll tell you why: because you are over-reliant on automation and autopilots. You (Glass pilots) seem to think nothing can go wrong with the moving map. This all but guarantees that the first time that this very possible phenomenon happens to you due to a dicked up automatic Nav update it could very well put mountain goats in your windscreen. It's even more possible though, I think, as PJ2 said, that in this accident the Captain locked-in on the main drag and mistook it for the runway. This would sorta explain why maybe he didn't turn downwind and got so far North. But the F/O should have caught it. Maybe if somebody was in rose mode, they would have seen this circuit was not parallel with the runway.
Maybe the fairly new F/O was hunched down putzing around with the Honeywell-two-finger-torture device instead of cross-checking raw DME and Weather radar in manual gain, and looking out the window.
It was a left circuit. It's probable in that poor weather the Capt was flying.
Weather Radar is another back up, along with raw DME which if thrown into your cross-scan is unlikely to fool you like a map shift might. One guy in the crew room quipped: But how can you know the difference between a cell and mountains?
Our answer was "Hey, who cares, we want to avoid all that stuff!"
Get out of auto, turn up the manual gain, tilt the antenna down till you get a little ground clutter, and avoid that dangerous RED!
Crunch
(The above is all just my opinion only).
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