Murexway- I've gone into microsleeps on a number of occasions, one that I remember was on final approach to PHL back in 1993 at a regional. An extenuating circumstance was that I was just beginning to feel the first symtoms of what would become a really nasty flu. (I went home). More recently I experienced a microsleep just after top of decsent into ANC, flying for a carrier with better than FAA FTLs but after a long sector. I just started this trip with a guy who told me he had a microsleep much later on an approach into ANC due to constant swapping from back to front of clock. I'm sure your MEX turns are tough, but flying your body's day versus night in the same trip even a long rest period is hard.
I also flew for a freight carrier with a hub sort in the midwest in the late 90s. I was lucky in that I slept pretty well on the daytime layovers. But the outbound flights (similar to UPS sort) were always hard even though I always napped in the hub during the sort. The human body just wants to sleep at certain times and it will do so.
Murexway, you're pretty hard on somebody suggesting a catastrophic incapacitation. We lost a Captain who had a heart attack rolling out in a DC-8 in Indy on 32 roughly 13 years ago. He started to drift off centerline and the F/O took control but couldn't stop it before they ran into the mud off the end. The engineer had to pry the guys hand off the thrust reversers. No movie, it can happen and it takes awhile to recognize incapacitation. Does your airline train for it? Mine does, although truth be told we always know its coming in training. It can be very ugly (ala JetBlue), it may come on slowly, or it may be very fast.
The reason your post got my attention is not that I think you had two people asleep at the controls or one incapacitated. You just don't seem to treat these things as a serious consideration because they haven't happened to you. By downplaying them you do the public readers and your fellow aviators a disservice in not letting people know how serious fatigue in particular can be. But somebody might have not been feeling well, or had microsleep, or just been really tired coming out of the hub sort and it might have effected descision making and reaction times. Its the biggest problem the industry faces. Its why you have people in the other forums and threads saying they wouldn't shoot a visual in SFO after a transpac flight. Microsleeps happen a lot, at just about every airline, and no phase of flight is immune. The body doesn't care. I would not be surprised to find fatigue listed a related factor here, on the other hand nobody will really know how they both slept the day before.
Passenger 389- Nobody is being insulting saying fatigue might be a factor. It isn't like the guy said they planned to have a sleep and wake up on short final. Unless you've been there, done it, and got the T-shirt with back of the clock flying you don't know what it feels like.