Trying to assess the human factors issues is crucial - not only to build an understanding of what transpired, but also to decrease the risk of a recurrence. Unfortunately this human factors assessment has been made more difficult as we have only been given selected extracts from the CVR. I am sure there are plenty more clues in the bits left out. In addition, we lack the all important quality of the speech - tone, volume, tempo etc
However I do understand and respect the view of BEA that some things do not belong in the public domain. All we can hope is that the human factors people that were involved in the investigation and privy to all the detail learned all there was to be learned.
Why did the Captain take more than a minute to get back to the cockpit? He was a 58 year old male. He had been in the cockpit for 4-5 hours prior to his rest. He would have had a meal and maybe some coffee. Where would he most likely go immediately after leaving the deck and before resting? I would guess that he was in the bathroom?
Despite all the talk here about the kids in the cockpit, both PF and PNF were reasonably experienced. The Captain seemed happy to leave for his rest, despite commenting that it would be turbulent during his rest.
1 h 51 min 58 It’s going to be turbulent when I go for my rest.
There was a very short handover to PNF when he arrived. Less than a minute between his arrival and Captain's departure. Despite ICTZ. Despite turbulence. Despite rising temp and a discussion only 10 minutes earlier about implications on max altitude.
So he seemed pretty confident in the other two pilots. Maybe too confident?
The guys really let Dubois down with their gibberish when he returned. If he was that confident in them and if they were essentially incoherent when he returned, then he may have been immediately overwhelmed by a perception that something very complicated must have taken place. He didn't rush in and take corrective action - because the problem was not clear to him, and no one told him what had happened. So he had to try and make sense of a cacophony of alarms, faulty data, error messages, and bewildered pilots who he believed were competent.
You can't expect someone to explain what they don't understand. But you can expect a concise account of what they did know. Look I not a pilot. But in my line of work (critical care medicine) I frequently get asked for urgent assistance when things go wrong. I don't expect solutions - that's my job. But I do expect to be given some useful information about events before I arrived. I understand this is harder for pilots than doctors - aviation emergencies are relatively rare, pilots may have concerns that their actions were somehow responsible for a problem, and they may even have concerns about their safety. Clear thinking and analytic skills go missing in the setting of unexpected stress and anxiety. But even allowing for all this, these guys appear to have dropped the ball - and possibly lost the final opportunity to recover the situation.
A couple of interesting comments from the Captain in the hour prior to his rest period:
0 h 58 min 07
Captain Try maybe to sleep twenty minutes when he comes back or before if you want
PF Yeah ok that’s kind, for the moment I don’t feel like it but if I do feel like it yeah
Is Dubois really saying he was happy for PF to have a doze while Dubois was having his rest period? Surely I am misunderstanding this.
1 h 27 min 56 How badly we see in this aeroplane with this lighting. It’s not a success
Could he have had trouble seeing the displays when he returned and was sitting behind the 2 pilots?