What disturbs me is .......
In 80's & 90's we had basic a/c operating into Nice, Samos, Heraklion, Zakinthos, Mykonos, Corfu, Calvi, Salzburg, Leeds, Inverness, Lanzarote, & numerous others in Europe, and I'm sure other similar airports around the world. It was a common occurrence. Basic a/c, basic nav aids, basic skills. As someone said on another thread, charter crews were expected to receive a mission to some new airfield, study the charts and then take their a/c & pax there safely. It seemed to work.
Now we have super sophisticated a/c, improved nav aids & ATC but a dilution is basic skills. There are some airlines that brief their crews to death, run sim sessions into new airfields and design specific procedures and routings to pump into the FMC to enable their crews to go there. Takes weeks of preparation. Each of these airfields have perfectly good charts published. They reinvent the wheel.
It would seem that todays technology has not caused an improved evolution of skills, but the opposite. I went to all those 'black spot' airfields. I understood the threats. but felt adequately capable to deal with them. This was in non-LNAV/VANV a/c. A visual approach was not a threat nor a problem. What could be easier than landing on a runway you could see from miles away. It had terrain surrounding it; yep, but you could see it. You knew about mountain winds and sea breezes. You knew how to fly the a/c and the airfield was authorised for your category of a/c. The runway was long enough, just. You got on with it because you were trained and competent.
Todays a/c are just as competent, even more so. They have more nav data information; they have better brakes and more powerful engines. Why has the job been made more difficult & perceived to be more dangerous?
Nice is no big deal. I've flown all the approaches there. It's a case of doing it correctly and being in control of your a/c, being configured correctly and looking out the window. It's a VFR approach. To someone who is used to big ILS airfields in flat lands it might look dodgy, but it's perfectly doable. I've taken B767 into much tighter & more basic airfields. A visual in a turbo-prop, biz-jet, medium jet is just that. I suspect it's the companies that make an easy job difficult by injecting nervousness into the crews and not training them properly, and imposing crazy restrictions on them about minimum finals and heights etc, and use of automatics and FMC's.
The root cause of this incident might be traced back to the training dept. Or it might be a crew screw up. If they were not trained properly or allowed to practice these type of approaches they might be expected to screw up.