"It looks like the Airbus is too sophisticated for use in African (conflicting) conditions. Unless flown by those who are die hard veterans."
Utter nonsense.The aircraft is not the factor is this case, but non compliance with instrument procedures and lack of flying skills.
having flown many years in Lybia myself as expat captain, we were often politically forced to fly with local lybian co- pilots, who all showed, despite many years of flightexperience similar caracteristics: Poor aircraft knowledge and flying skills, low compliance to instrument procedures, VFR orientated .
All occasions when we hit the minima and negative contact, they would continue visual "trying to find the runway" instead of going around, often following a road or similar landmarks.
Almost certain this is what happened here. Having flown the NBD to RWY 09 a lot there is nothing inherently dangerous about it and the airbus would have certainly assisted them with a GPS overlay to make it even more accurate, especially if the accuracy of the NBD would have let them down.
What contributes to the crews lack of airmanship is that they did not ask for 27 with an ILS-the wind was calm- (the sun would not be glaring in their face and lower minima), but most of all that fog-morning fog in Tripoli is -and any local pilot can or should tell you that-allways is a very shorterm issue, and will clear in 20-30 min, often less and a short hold would have solved it.
Instead the crew choose to shortcut and take RWY 09 to save time, hoping to get to the minima visually albeit against the odds and thereafter decided to continue visually, "not to lose face", even when they did not have the RWY in sight, and killing all those innocent people in the process...
Last edited by space pig; 2nd Mar 2013 at 21:30.