Thanks for your answers to my questions Showbo, I really appreciate your analysis.
The last time I trained in Toulouse, the Concorde sim was still down the hall.
I rather suspect the captain thought the reason was because of the "high" feed in and that he thought he was well above the path and that is why he continued to drive down in VS. All the while, the real reason the path never appeared was because the box hadn't been sequenced correctly.
Would the football be pegged at the bottom in this case or would path guidance not be displayed at all? It seems that the scale and 9999's were on the screen at some point from the panel questioning.
A lot of the questions in the hearing derive from issues raised in the interview summaries in the accident docket.
The 'technique' of putting something lower than the MDA on the approach page of the FMC seems to be mentioned repeatedly in the pilot interviews. If this was done it would explain why the autopilot was still on below MDA in the accident.