[Asbestos suit on]
I wouldn't have expected them to do anything other than what they did because both the Manufacturer and Air Nelson told them ( through the QRH and verbally ) that the gear was down and locked. The manufacturer was adamant that that the gear was down and locked if three greens showed on the backup system, they designed the system, they tested the system, they have monitored the systems performance through many incidents and accidents while sitting at desks with no fuel induced time pressure. If I was the Capt of that flight I would have felt confident that they were correct.
And manufacturers are NEVER wrong...
It's pretty scary to see so many pilots utterly incapable of thinking outside the box. SOPs are great and all, but there have been (and always will be) many scenarios that are not necessarily solvable by slavish obedience to checklists and procedures. As a wise person once said, "rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men".
By all means fly by the SOPs and use all the checklists appropriately - I do. However, I have been in situations where strict obedience to the procedures would have had us in a fatal crash scenario. You are allowed to think - a prerequisite for a pilot's licence is not a lobotomy.
As we can see from the incident in question - and many others - the crew should have been able to rely on the information they had, and draw the correct conclusions. But - guess what? There were errors in the systems designed to protect the aircraft and the crew. And I'm not even slightly surprised.
Airmanship used to be about a pilot making a correct decision based on all the available evidence, including such things as taking account of any uneasiness about what the pilot is looking at or sensing. Far better that than slavish obedience to "procedure".
And I don't buy the culpability argument. If you do everything by the book but still crash and kill people, you are just as likely to be hung on the "duty of care" provisions as anything else. There's a lot more to it than "by the book".
I don't think the Air Nelson incident(s) is/are a big deal in themselves, but they do illustrate (in my opinion) a worrying trend towards slavish obedience to procedures by pilots, and a somewhat typical arrogance in NZ aviation circles towards manufacturer's SOPs.