Originally Posted by
louisnewmark
... What it normally provides is, ironically for this scenario, far greater situational awareness ... takes up less mental capacity, not more. For this reason, I wonder if there was a degree of cognitive bias at work here: the Irish crew were expecting very low-lying rocks rather than a big island, so that's how they interpreted their displays.
That's also what I see. But will add that transferring old procedures to a new cockpit is often underestimated as a task.
In this case once the initial mental picture of the scenario was created, all that additional SA just provided confirmation. What was required was something to look wrong. EGPWS could have done that, with a significantly red blob of terrain. NVDs could also have done that with a looming piece of land.