Nobody knows what went on there, yet.
That flight had an inarguably lousy outcome, didn't it? Ending up in a smoking heap is pretty undignified, at least to my way of thinking; that's not an outcome one really seeks. That is about it for now, though.
It's not that one wishes to "drag" anyone "through the mud," but it takes much more than saying the right things on the radio to merit any sort of "Well done!" We shouldn't forget that 'accountability' thing that crews have to contend with, when this flight ended in disaster. It might well be that there was nothing better that the crew could have done under the circumstances; we have to wait and see about that, but I think it's a bit premature to congratulate them on a job well done. It might make more sense to wait for the accident report to see about that. As to that, the NCAA has been given much more freedom from political influence, so that we may see a perfectly acceptable accident investigation and report. Even in the past I remember reading some accident reports that seemed perfectly straight.
The main thing must be to figure out what went wrong so that we may avoid having such an accident in future. If the radio calls went right, well, Okay, but that is very much beside the point in figuring out what we really need to know, what went wrong, isn't it? We need to know how to avoid having this sort of accident, if possible.
That the crew may have been totally calm and collected while having the accident... it's nice to think so, but what use is speculating about that, since it didn't seem to give a very good outcome?
At a certain point you the pilot may find yourself 'just along for the ride,' once your other options have all been used up. The whole point of a crash investigation for a pilot may be to tell one how to avoid getting into such a situation that one ends up crashing in this way.
How one behaves once one is in such a fix, well... I don't waste a lot of time worrying about that! You have some accident crews who were pretty emotional, yet they lived, and others who were total stoics, yet they died. That's down to individual character, I suppose, when what we need to know about is how to survive whatever just killed all these people.
Last edited by chuks; 13th Jun 2012 at 12:35.