Pause
Lord Wingspan almighty, maker of all Lift, what a thread! I give thanks for it. May it be some comfort to those who grieve for 1354's fliers that herein, on this thread, many fine, wise knowledgeable and dedicated Professional aviators are busy positing and counter-posting and vetting and sorting out whatever fact or conjecture might be relevant. Think of the crashing sound of The Doors song, Waiting for the Sun. Waiting (for an NTSB probe followed by analysis followed by report-writing followed by report approval and sometime in the somewhat foreseeable future: issuance) is not what we choose to do
Questions: does NTSB have some review process by which it goes to (for example) ALPA with the results of its investigation, before preparing its report, and ask whether such a representative of pilots would add any other data or tests? Does NTSB vet an outline of its proposed analytic framework for identifying probable cause? Does it circulate a draft report to anyone outside the agency for comment before making and declaring it final?
I don't trust bureaucracy. I trust leadership. I am just not convinced, at this time, that the leadership on causal analysis being publicly developed in very quick order on this thread, is something which both FAA and NTSB are prepared to integrate into their far more 'analog' worlds. This accident should send up a red flag that something was deeply flawed somewhere. And even if that supposition on my part turns out to have been alarmist or merely incorrect, the challenges posed by the Triple 7 CFIT in Dirty Harry Town are much greater, aren't they, because they reach into ICAO realms.
Yes, I am advocating a kind of mobilization, a kind of increased operational tempo, a surge (not a bad word), to get to the root cause. My engineering education, limited and informal though it may be, did strike Truth at least in this: The Careful Enough Statement of the Problem Implies the Solution.