Re “… new safety device/procedure/regulation tends to instil more confidence, and perhaps complacency.” #298 barit1,
In general I would agree.
From a limited flight evaluation of T2CAS (several years ago), the uniqueness of the predictive climb capability stood out as something which could be misused. Just because a computation predicts that the aircraft can out-climb the rising terrain (alt/distance) does not mean that the aircraft will avoid terrain if the required procedures are not followed, and of course there are still rare situations where the aircraft performance is insufficient.
A significant difference between EGPWS and T2CAS is that the simplistic originating ideas (an alerting function ‘Terrain Ahead’ – the crew should take action, and the warning function ‘Terrain Pull Up’ – the crew must take action) have been intermixed with what-if ‘conditional’ computations in T2CAS which perhaps encourage deliberation in the choice of action as opposed to immediate action.
Whatever the crew thought in the accident situation may not be known.
My conclusions from flying T2CAS towards steeply rising terrain (too steep) may have been biased by the VFR conditions and ability to turn sharply to avoid the terrain as the limits of the warning mode (aircraft performance) were reached, but I didn’t ‘buy’ the system at that time.