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so why is no-one talking about similarities with british Airways crash of their 777 when there was no power increase final? iced up fuel lines thought to be probable cause. Not a hint on any network that that might explain it all. and the missing engine? Torn off by the sea wall. everyone is ignoring its loss. if the same reason would have high seriosness for Boeing 777 fleet!
Because the similarity is with the Turkish 738 crash at Amsterdam, not the BA.
Actually, the similarity with TK1951 is a bit limited in that the precipitating factor for that accident was an undiagnosed RA failure resulting in a change of auto thrust mode that was unrecognized by the crew, and was accompanied by a distraction from monitoring of the basic flight parameters by the PIC that the accident report suggests may be attributable to the training captain's conduct of "instruction tasks".
A more comparable accident would be IC605, an Indian Airlines A320 that crashed at Bangalore in 1990. Like this accident the situation involved an upgrade captain under-going initial line training on a new aircraft type and, as may be the case in this accident, the precipitating factor was solely a failure of the PF to comprehend the nature of the auto thrust mode that had been selected as a result of the crew's own actions (and also inaction on the part of the instructor who was PNF in that instance).
As a veteran of many years spent flying in Korea, India and other parts of Asia I can attest to the fact that visual approach procedures were infrequently practiced and often poorly executed by many of my national colleagues. This is not an accusation, simply the observation of someone with a good deal of experience working in those cockpit environments. Consider that for what it is worth in conjunction with the evidence available thus far on this event.
Another issue that is likely to become very pertinent is the nature of how "training" is conducted at a number of the Asian carriers. It is very different from the experience of training at most Western carriers. Students are expected to arrive already knowing (generally by memorization) all of the answers, and are not actively taught by their instructors. Information or discussion related to upcoming tasks is rarely, if ever, introduced and critique is generally limited to "How come you don't know ...."
In this environment students tend to remain silent about anything they don't know and will continue doing whatever they are doing, however badly, until the instructor intercedes to tell them to do something else. Frequently this intercession manifests itself in the instructor actively manipulating the controls, gear, flaps, speed brakes as he determines necessary without any other guidance than perhaps a "How come you are too high/low fast/slow ..."
It will be revealing to see what the details are of the instruction the upgrading pilot actually received from the training pilot about how to conduct a visual approach, particularly if it started out from a slam dunk. Similarly there will be a lot of questions to ask about what level of training was completed during the preceding sim and line training on visual approaches and on the inter-relationship of auto flight and auto thrust modes that can occur while conducting a visual approach. A cynic might also wonder whether the records reflect the reality, though in this case I believe the sim training would have been conducted by a reputable and accountable training organization.
Beyond all the questions regarding how the approach was conducted, perhaps the most germane question will be why the go-around was not conducted at an early enough point to avoid the accident. A preliminary collection of observations would suggest that an unrecognized deviation of airspeed was not the only parameter to have exceeded stabilized approach criteria. Before this both altitude (as a function of distance to the runway and probably via working PAPI's) and vertical speed are likely to have exceeded allowable limits per the company's SOP. Why, apparently, no call-outs and no go-around until it was far too late to do any good?
Though the company I worked for in Korea made many mistakes one thing that changed for the better during my stay was the company policy on go-arounds. Instead of being grounds for punishment it was clearly stated that a safely conducted go-around would be a "get out of jail free card" for any unintentional violations of the stabilized approach criteria. Continuing, on the contrary, would indeed bring down the full wrath of the FOQA monitoring/punishment system. My guess would be that OZ is no different in this regard and likely has a similar policy. If so, the reason why that didn't work may come down to another characteristic known to occur when things appear to be going badly wrong ... some pilots just stop actively thinking and doing and become passive observers in the face of a problem they don't know how to control.