imo there are considerable differences between flying a formal "procedural" visual circuit or the equally procedural visual circle-to-land that my company trains and radar positioning to a visual approach. It may seem a strange suggestion to non-pilots but I think other pilots will understand what I mean.
If you haven't been specifically trained to do this it may seem quite alien, simply because it isn't "linked" to flight regimes we are used to. I've certainly seen our exceptionally well trained (Eu) FOs quite unsettled by having to do this without instrument guidance when they're more than capable of doing the first two manoeuvres mentioned simply because they aren't used to it.
As the fast jet pilot said several pages back (sorry, name escapes me now) if you don't train and practice simple manoeuvres you're quite likely to get them wrong.
Add to this a clearly unsuitable approach profile for any airport outside a mountain range, a (to me) ludicrous request for 180 to 5 (as by our operating standards we'd risk inability to land from such an unstable approach in an aircraft of one third the weight - is this really Europeans being "over cautious"???) and finally RT so atrociously mangled and gabbled that imo this alone have the place shut down for retraining of ATC and its beginning to look like the Koreans are by no means alone in shouldering the responsibility for this accident. That anyone with English as a first language copes with that sort of gobbldegook is impressive, how anyone without it manages is nothing less than incredible.
I don't usually go in for US bashing, but several aspects of the environment these guys were flying in look more like Africa 20 years ago than anything I've ever seen or heard in 15,000hrs in Europe.
Last edited by Agaricus bisporus; 11th Jul 2013 at 22:00.