You have an ‘inbuilt’ awareness / relationship with tailwind and F40. Excellent, but how was this achieved, learnt, taught; whatever that process was/is, it was apparently lacking in the accident scenario (a difference in views) – this doesn’t discount the possibility that the crew knew about F40, but just failed to recall it on the day. Your ‘trigger’ appears to be ‘tailwind’ – I fully agree with that concept.
There is a good point here. A lot of the time we think things are " just basic common sense" but if we dig deeper and question why they are so obvious to us, we find that it is because of the environment we have learned in, trained in, operated in. Prior to operating in Asia I would have put much of my 'inbuilt awareness' into the category of basic common sense. But after I had been operating with crews from all over the planet with sometimes very poor training backgrounds, I realised that at some stage I had been taught these things, or observed them in others and taken them on myself, and the chaps I was flying with had not been so fortunate. Personally I would have thought that an AA crew would have had the benefit of great training and experience but I have never flown in the US so I'm not sure.
and so a bias towards the ILS is to some extent natural.
I wonder if that is in part due to the fact that the US has a lot of ILS's available to crew. For a 737 crew in this part of the world an RNAV approach is very common and I don't think it would put many people off changing runways.
a last minute change to an RNav 30 is not an option if not already prebriefed/set up
I strongly disagree with that. It is up to the crew to make the time to brief it and set it up via a holding pattern or vectors. If it can't be done without losing the option of a divert then maybe the divert is the best choice? Maybe fuel policy needs addressing?
On that note, how important are accident reports to aiding pilot decision making? Ten years ago I read a report about an aircraft that had a runway change just before joining an arc, instead of turning right to arc left they were asked to turn left and arc right. They accepted the change and quickly lost SA and crashed 7 miles short of the field. At the time I was new to command and decided that if faced with that situation I would request direct to the overhead to hold and brief the new approach. Guess what, a month later that exact scenario happened to me approaching an NDB arc .the F/o read the new clearance back but I asked him to request direct to the overhead for the hold. It was easy because I had made the decision a month earlier, that was the benefit of the report to me, advanced decision making. So in my mind, if we are serious as an industry about improving decision making, why not use our findings from reports? What would be wrong with rostering one day a year in the classroom to dissect an accident report or three? It will cost money but will it make the industry safer?