The idea behind giving the commander the authority to deviate from established rules and procedures is to achieve higher level of safety through breaching them, not lower.
IMHO, this fellow was very near to getting totally overwhelmed by having the real emergency thrown on him and that's something that cannot be corrected by additional training. There should be psychological selection even before basic training is commenced, not quite dissimilar from:
Originally Posted by Ernest Kellogg Gann
Separation of the dedicated from the merely hopeful has been a crafty affair performed mostly by the line's chief pilots. They are braced with a fixed set of standards from which, in self-protection, they rarely deviate. They are hard, suspicious men, navigating uncomfortably between what is a frankly commercial enterprise and a group of fractious, often temperamental, zealots. And since it is also their lot to be the first to inform a pilot's wife that she is now a widow, they do what they can to see within an applicant. They try to picture him a few years hence, when he may find himself beset with the troubles aloft. How will he behave in sole command, when a quick decision or even a sudden movement can make a difference between safety and tragedy? Yet the chief pilots do not look for heroes. They much prefer a certain intangible stability, which in moments of crisis is often found among the more irascible and reckless.
Of course, we have come a long way from 1930ies, so such an approach might not serve well our enlightened age. Besides, harder selection would be bad for flight training industry and its collapse could adversely affect the airlines. We don't want that to happen, do we?
