There are many, many factors at work here, but a few things stand out for me:
The comment was made:
GEOFF THOMSON: With six people safely on board, they take off from Samoa just before dark.
Captain Dominic James had flown patients to Australia from islands in the South Pacific about 50 times in the two years he'd been a Medevac pilot.
So in two years in the South Pacific, he never picked up that weather at Norfolk was dodgy / changeable at the best of times? If he hadn't flown it personally, surely it would've come up in the pre-flight briefing with the CP, or at some point over hangar beers (don't know Pel Air's culture, so I'm guessing here).
Yes, there are many factors contributing that can be blamed which have been listed in other posts but at the end of the day, there is only one bum in the left hand seat.
As Richard de Crespigny (QF32) points out - a flight deck is not a committee.
I was reminded of a comment by the late, great, Gordon Smith who said (or quoted) - a superior pilot uses his superior intellect to keep out of situations where his superior flying skills are required.
The true heroes (for me) are the blokes who took their boat out through a narrow gap in the reef, at night, in crap weather, with no information but guesswork, and came back in again safely. And the bloke who went and stood on the lookout, and looked all around, to see the torch. Quite scary to consider that survival came down to a bloke, on a hill, who used his eyes (no radar, no Spiderwatch, no Flight Tracker) to look in the wrong direction (West, not South, as assumed).