In a sea of woeful ignorance in the last 112 pages, there have been one or two nuggets of gold - principally from 777 drivers who actually know what they are talking about. No doubt much will be made as to how the crew got into the situation they did and that will be a debate for another time. The key thing that stands out to any professional pilot is that the crew in question ignored the stabilised approach criteria and were allegedly descending at nearly twice the normal rate of descent below 500'. For any professional pilot that would necessitate an immediate go-around and living to fight another day. In any normal airline it would be a non-event and the most the crew could expect would be a question as to why they waited so long to initiate the go-around. Sadly in this case the worst excesses of Korean culture (and there are many very positive elements to this great nation) may have come into play. At the exact moment a regular western First Officer would have been shouting his head off to go-around, it may be that an over-polite and deferential group of three other pilots chose to watch a dangerously decaying situation become irrecoverable before the call was made to go-around.
How you defeat such a cultural problem, whereby it is rude and unacceptable to question someone in authority, is hard to say. Perhaps the answer lies with the Koreans themselves who surely must begin to question why they have had so many accidents over the years despite being such highly educated and intelligent people. The two other questions I would be asking is what happens to someone who does question authority in a decaying situation, and do military pilots receive preferential treatment in terms of advancing up the seniority list? Do pilots who have questioned authority get 'sorted' at some later stage in sim checks or experience general rejection by the rest of the pilot community? The sub-question I would then ask would be how the ex-military pilots conduct themselves in terms of CRM (I am ex-military myself by the way). To an extent these are all taboo areas in a cultural sense but they are so critical to understanding what went wrong here.