Having read the full CVR transcript, my overall impression is that the approach was poorly briefed, in particular with regard to the weather. The Captain seemed to be behind the aircraft, and not in command - reacting instead of thinking ahead. She had very poor situational awareness, and her monitoring calls were non-standard and too vague. A go-around, (which was not briefed), should have been called. In fact, there is very little evidence on the transcript of any briefing about which runway, which approach facility, what its frequency and identifier was, and which other navigational aids etc. would be used. There seemed to be confusion between the pilots as to how some of the aircraft systems operated. The F/O was getting overloaded, as you can see because there are times when he just mindlessly repeats a word the Captain uses, just to be saying something, but seemingly without any spare capacity to say or do anything else.
A slightly pedantic point, but I believe this is also an illustration of why one should use the correct terminology.
Had the Captain used the correct SOP call for their airline at very short finals, both pilots would have known without doubt what was happening, i.e. a complete transfer of control was intended.
It seems that the F/O thought the Captain intended to take full control, but perhaps the Captain only meant to "help" with the throttles - she was worried about the aircraft speed in the latter stages - and not the control column too.
I don't want to get into a USA bashing here, but having just returned from a UK-Florida flight; ATC RT calls in the USA seem to have departed from standard by quite a large degree. Normally, everyone gets the message correctly, but sometimes things can turn around and bite you in the a**e. Standard RT language does sound very anal, (and 'British'), but it is designed for a reason. Some pilots try to sound very slick and - in their minds - professional by using slang and cod phrases, but beware. In particular the number of times one hears call-signs and next frequencies missed is amazing. Calls like "Center-southwest-twenty-twenty-five-out-of-two-five-oh-comin'-down-eighteen-thousand-thirty-twenty-seven-smooth", (spoken rapidly like an auctioneer), are very common. They sound slick, confident and clever, but can give rise to confusions and extra read-backs when things start getting busy or difficult.
The transcript of this approach shows that all users are trying to be very slick with made-up phrases such as "Tower's on eighteen seven". The weather avoidance calls should be something like "Requesting right turn, heading xxx to avoid weather", but instead there is: "We uh.... we just need to cheat a little right here".
I will probably get flamed now, but I reckon this sort of slang phraseology both between plane and ATC and pilot to pilot can cause confusions - and extra workload - to occur.
Last edited by Uplinker; 10th Nov 2014 at 11:45.