Now we are talking about panning down with the radar to see terrain during a circling approach? Really!
Yes, really BOAC. It's a safety thing that old hands did when mountains or hills are close to the airport. It only takes a second for one guy to reach over and set it up. The new radars are so much better than the old bendix units you're probably familiar with. Some of the old bendix green screen radars were not stabilized. These new Collins and other units have an IRU (Like INS) stabilization input into them (even in manual), and work great even though you're pitching up and down. They recover faster after coming out of the turns also. Unfortunately, we had a lot of trouble with the automatic declutter function in auto. It would black out everything sometimes (software thing) which is why I advocate manual gain
Forget mapping radar, g/a mode, ATC radar, DME arcs. They were either both being stupid or both ....... being stupid.
Well since we may never see a voice recorder transcript or a flight data recorder printout and know for sure, we have to take educated guesses. Beyond your diagnosis of extreme stupidity, is that all you have to offer?
All the things you just ruled out, would have probably have saved them, if they had known the importance of backing up your visual with some sort of safety net.
The question we should be asking is WHY? One very experienced Captain, one ex-Mil F/O, both with some sort of acquired self-preservation instinct, surely? Things just do not stack up here.
A fighter jock co-pilot, with little airline experience paired with an old Captain with no appreciable Airbus experience is a formula for disaster imho (If that rumor is true.) I was struggling just to keep Outto out of the rocks and the new fighter jocks had no clue which way the thing was headed. I was completely solo with a couple of them.... "What's it doing now?" was all you ever heard, and the guy's head would go down for another adventure in command-line programing. And if you were on the Airbus jump seat, the most dangerous thing you could hear was: "so what do you think this mode does?" High workload, distracting machines, unless you downgrade them to the lowest level of automation: da pilot.
I'll get my hat and coat.....
CC