Diverging:-)
Whilst such events as this one is of concern I am of the belief that humans are their worst own enemies when it comes to automation.
Mankind invented the lighter than air machine, essentially the aeroplane many many years ago now & has improved out of sight it's capabilities from the days where Wilbur & Orville stood there on Kill-Devil hills with a machine in it's infancy but mankind himself has not evolved one inch in some ways.
Sure we have advanced training via Sims etc, higher education abilities thru knowledge gained over the years & multiple bad mistakes in which to learn from but still we humans take a perfectly serviceable plane complete with hapless pax straight into the side of a hill!
Even though the human has almost been taken out of the equation here in the way of automation (pilot-less planes are already here & technically we are not really needed up at the pointy end other than redundancy) we still do what humans do best, make mistakes. You can make 100 airframes identical to perform exactly the same way every time but you will NOT make a 100 pilots do likewise, there in lies the "oil & water" interface that will never be bred or automated out.
Checklists, training, Psycho testing crap at interview level all the stuff that's meant to make the human the best he can amounts to little at the end of the day, the above 'process' weeds out a few but that's all.
CRM is a modern day "feel good" terminology & it's an industry in itself but whether it's making or going to make a noticeable impact on why humans make mistakes is arguable I believe. Back before they invented the hairy fairy CRM thingy Capt's of flying machines when faced with adversary would have enlisted the help of everything & everyone so save if nothing else his own butt so CRM has essentially been around well before it was dreamed up!
Australia has some pretty ordinary recorded events from our own pilots so Thia are not the only Airline under question here I believe.
The case in question here the 777 event is the perfect Eg of humans in action when man & machine are interfaced. The weather was fine, the crew where trained (well meant to be) the machine was one of the finest available but the human was/is the weakest link in the chain of events here as in any incident/accident.
I know I've looked back on some silly things I've done (especially in the Sim) & wondered why the hell did I do that when I know better?
The human mind, we know very little about it which shows every now & then & not just thru aviation either:-)
We can improve, we can be seen to be doing the right thing to reduce but we simply have to accept that incidents such as this one will continue to happen as long as mankind has the desire to fly:-)
Just some food for thought not meant to be anything else here:-)
Wmk2
Wmk2