“They’d all be walking, talking and alive if they went around”...

[alf5071h]

The Bloomberg article is very retrospective and takes its journalistic lead from recent FSF activities.
It’s easy with hindsight to conclude ‘if only the pilots had …’.
The focus on ‘the lack of a GA decision’ implies human failure – end of investigation; this overlooks any underlying factors. Instead of viewing the failure to GA as a cause, it should be considered as a consequence of preceding activity or aspects of operation. Perhaps the crew never realised the need to make a decision; their (flawed) understanding of the situation (with hindsight) never triggered the unstable approach criteria. There was no ‘need’ to make a decision.

There could be many contributions to this situation – workload, weak cues, poor awareness, peer pressure, safety culture, habit, or biased perceptions of risk, most of which involve human performance – sharp end and blunt end of the organisation.
Often in these approach situations the human becomes mentally maxed out, and significantly in rare circumstances, both crew at the same time. Thus not only are there individual weaknesses, but also crew weaknesses, difficulties with monitoring, intervention, CRM.
Thus the industry should be asking why is human performance apparently limited in these circumstances, was human performance a dominant factor, or were there external factors which have stronger influence.