SLFinAZ
I am very familiar with command responsibility Nigel, and am also very capable of passing judgement accordingly. The aircraft commander has final responsibility for all souls in his care. This is not a case of all the holes lining up but a profound lapse in judgement. Take out all the garbage and questionable decisions and boil it down to a simple reality. He chose to bust his minimums....
May I ask you 2 questions:
- Have you actually read the report
- Since you choose to stick to the "P1 is sole person responsible", presume you agree with my
if you say the PIC is the only person to blame, you are effectively saying that now he is dead and buried, we can ignore the rest of the findings - we have removed the entire problem and so there will no no repetition
...further ignoring the terrain warnings just makes it worse
Have you actually thought through the "Terrain Warning(s)"? Whilst a reaction to them would have prevented this accident, so would the P2's attempted GA, a diversion or whatever. But it is my reading of the system and report that the warning was actually "spurious"... / a side effect of the inappropriate system with that airfield / approach. In short, to land at that airfield, on a correctly flown approach, in VMC or IMC, they would have had to ignore the "Pull Up", or devise (as we do in my company) a very strange way of flying QFE approaches (where we convert everything ATC say to QNH - hardly ideal)
and inhibit the TAWS.
We will obviously disagree, but in my book, the day of just blaming a dead pilot and congratulating everybody else (and our own selves) on not being so arrogant / stupid / unprofessional does little to advance flight safety, and fortunately most of the world has moved on. A fairly good read of that report, and I would think most people could see how the holes lined up, and combined with certain human failings (from which we will all suffer at times) a tragic outcome resulted. One needs to design a "system" where such human failings will get trapped - which we have come a fair way to in modern western airline culture. This culture is still not perfect however, and I am unfamiliar with other cultures, but we can see aspects of them in accidents such as this.
NoD