Mr Bailey's analysis sounds correct, although he has simplified it for his audience. Hence his statement that pilots are "rigorously trained to trust failsafe automatics".
It would be more accurate to say repeated experience reinforces expectation of a certain result from a given action, and in an unusual and stressful event the inevitable intuitive reaction may end up with a situation nobody expected.
We can bang on about pushing the thrust levers up as an associated action, and fair enough, but strictly speaking thats not how the system is designed, and not how we use TOGA on a day to day basis. Off the top of my head the only procedures formally trained that way are Windshear and GPWS. I have never heard of go round off a bounce being trained for either.
And who knows, maybe the thrust levers were shoved forward but not far enough? In fact that sounds quite feasable: an armful of power lever and expecting the autothrottle to finish it off would disguise the situation.
It has become common practice to brief the FCTM procedure for bounced landing in the last few years. I have never heard any body say "oh, and by the way: Autothrottle TOGA mode won't work". That would be because nobody has thought of it before. Same as prior to the Asiana crash nobody had thought about the effect of indirect mode change. And half of all pilots still don't understand it.
This thread will probably spin off into a manual skills blag but that would be missing the point. And the point is the Boeing FCTM, FCOM and training.
Of course all this is still just speculation in the absence of facts.
Last edited by HPSOV L; 9th Aug 2016 at 01:40.