rusty
The report leaves unsaid any suggestion that the pilot was in the wrong frame of mind for the flight.
I suggest however that there are clues that he was what I call "rusty".
If I had enjoyed both a fortnight's holiday far from Farnborough and a happy night with my family in a nearby hotel, I would have certainly lost my edge as a pilot.
Just before Christmas 1962 I ferried a Canberra B2 to the UK. After the holiday my crew was due to fly the replacement B15 aircraft out of Lyneham. That notorious winter kept our aircraft on the ground for days on end. On 5 January, just over a fortnight from my last shakedown flight, I saw a chance to launch. The runway still had snow on it, there was more snow in the air and the cloudbase was low. A GCA recovery would have been testing but feasible - good enough for me. I was more scrupulous than usual with the checklist, being used in the ordinary way to doing the checks from memory. The aircraft was heavier than the B2 I knew and was of course heavy with fuel. I would have said that the takeoff and climb went well - except that at about 1500 feet I suddenly realised that I had about 60 degrees of uncommanded bank. Where that came from and what I was doing while it developed I cannot say. With such a clear warning, nor can I say that, as a result, I sharpened up during the flight - I sort of depended on the trusty steed cruising to Luqa and taxying to its stable with no further challenges for me to deal with. That day I was definitely "rusty".
As an instructor, I learned to recognise a sure sign of another pilot being (if a student) behind the curve or (if experienced) simply rusty. It is the sign of tunnel vision. In my story, I lost the Attitude Indicator for far too long. The Phenom pilot seems to have been able only to deal with successive immediate problems, neglecting all other potential problems awaiting him.
The Phenom pilot will have known that local best practice was to join the airfield via Left base to land. He presumably chose a full circuit to bleed off excess energy, but failed to achieve that through the external distractions the report describes.
He sort-of-decides to land ahead of the C42 and seems to have blundered into a very tight base leg curve to get ahead of it. Who knows how much time he lost assimilating the irrelevant radio traffic from Farnborough. When the TCAS called the C42 downwind, he responded perhaps on reflex but responded wrongly because he half knew that he should be above the C42 while the TCAS would have sent him below it. He turned in to land much too early, in the light of his speed, presumably because he was fixated on getting ahead of the C42 and no doubt (tunnel vision again) he had not looked at the speed for far too long. At this late stage he presumably gave time he had not got to the TCAS messages about, and the relative position of, the south-bound light aircraft.
Clear of all those distractions, why did he persist with his hot approach to land ? The report can give no instance of his ever going-around from finals in his Phenom career. It finds him three months earlier doing a dirty dart into Jeddah, just as killed him at Blackbushe. He was presumably habituated to a first-time landing, if not just out of professional pride. That is not, by itself, a product of rustiness.
What is, though, the most telling of all symptoms of his rustiness in the report is the instance of his selecting spoilers on top of the selected flap. He knew he was hot, he knew that the spoiler would not work but, while he still had time, he forgot the obvious answer to his problem (perhaps because he had never used it in anger) – to go around. That is how tunnel vision – and rustiness - works.