BOAC, “ I cannot see how you could contemplate the Airblue crew being 'head down' …”.
An understandable thought, but rule nothing out. I have encountered such ‘unbelievable’ extremes in incident / accident investigation. These were predominantly aspects of human behaviour – mis-understanding, mis-conception, poor training, etc, etc, even the influence of modern technology or ‘automation’.
The crew ‘sneak a peek’ at the ND for a position check, inadvertently loose contact with the airport environment, then revert head down – to fly a go-around, but don’t, because the ND map provides adequate cues to continue the CTL until they become visual, i.e. the crew know better, fail to appreciate / consider the risks, discipline, – done it before, etc, etc, - human behaviour.
Not 'cojones', just human. In trying to understand these behaviours, we must start with ourselves; what small transgressions do we accept, e.g. for you and I, how many times above 48k without a pressure jerkin, or above 56k … ? Do we really know the risks or are we risk takers, for fun or to achieve an objective, do we think we are helping someone?
Don’t look for the human ‘failures’ in an accident, instead look at what prevents the vast majority of pilots taking such extreme risks. Look at what should be normal, and why this normality appears not to have existed in this situation?