TRF4EVR, I'm suggesting no such thing. All I'm saying is that maybe it could have been a contributing factor, perhaps explaining (at least partially) why they were lower than procedure would require on the approach. And yes, the internet is a wonderful thing - you only have to look at the military aircrew threads on this forum to see descriptions of pilots mistaking roads for runways - are you going to make dismissive comments about that too?. Most of the time, this sort of thing results in nothing more than embarrassment. But most accidents have more than one cause - and a misreading of ones distance from the coastline, on its own, isn't going to cause the plane to land short. On its own. As yet, we don't know what else was going on. If visibility wasn't an issue, my suggestion is irrelevant - but if it was, why ignore the possibility that the pilots 'saw' what they expected to see - this is a common enough error. Obviously, they couldn't have carried on to intentionally 'touch down' on the reef without realising - but then we know that they'd declared an emergency anyway. If they had other issues, and the stress that would go with them, misreading their distance from the runway threshold, even if only for a few moments, might possibly help explain what occurred.