A little harsh, I think. If a person crashes a vehicle on a motorway due to reckless driving and causes a 30 vehicle pile up, leading to a heavy loss of life, the person would expect a jail term but nothing like that which would be imposed for mass murder. The difference, of course, is a lack of 'intent'.
I am not excusing their behaviour and poor airmanship. In fact, I agree that there are too many 'cowboys' flying these days (perhaps there always have been) but pilots need to be incentivised to fly to their professional potential. Say a pilot with good potential and a basic licence goes to fly with a cowboy operator or the same pilot instead gets lucky and goes to a legacy carrier. After 3000 hrs his or her day to day performance will be very noticeably different.
Plenty of us will admit to flying 'better' on a line check than on a day out with a long-standing buddy. Professionalism is about gaining and then maintaining standards, but no individual is perfect all the time.
What we have here is a serious case of all the holes in the Swiss cheese lining up and causing an accident. At any time, a single event - a Go Around - would have saved the day. The key point, however, is not to come down hard ONLY on the crew, but to look carefully at all the causal factors in equal measure.
An over-worked PIC? A steep cockpit gradient with an inexperienced SIC (one could argue that hours in a logbook doesn't equate to experience; whereas assertiveness from the SIC improves with experience); the whole P2Fly concept and a lack of experience in the cockpit; a lack of respect for SOPs; rostering and other factors that encourage get-home-itis; an ineffective Regulator.
There is a long list of causal factors, very few of which were touched upon in the preliminary report.
Last edited by Mikehotel152; 17th May 2013 at 05:38.