Originally Posted by
andrasz
On first read a rather well prepared report with no window washing. What I find rather sobering is the number of uncovered shortcomings both on the side of the airport and the operator, many of which were not a contributing cause and would have remained unnoticed were not for the accident.
Been a lurker for a while but it's time to ask: have I understood this report correctly?
The crew set up an approach for some of the nastiest conditions imaginable. They hit the button at the FAF to have George drive all the way down to the ground on a calculated FPA. Georges let the airplane get low but nobody noticed because the SOP said they didn't have to check.
They let Georges continue way below minimum disconnect height, as they thought they might see something, they had a "conversation" about what they COULD see when well below MDA. Eventually they decided things weren't right, in just enough time to write the aircraft off without actually killing anyone. Since the minimum altitude shown is 50 ft below the threshold, it seems to have been only by a huge amount of luck that this wasn't 138 fatalities and not AC's initially claimed "hard landing"!
But hey, according to this report it was all in accordance with the local laws and the airline's own SOPs, so, no big deal! You don't need to see an actual timeline of crew or automatic callouts, or other flight parameters. The report provides over 20 paragraphs about the Captain's snoring/potential fatigue problem, which it turns out not to have been an issue, but only 2 about why the aircraft deviated from the planned flight path to cause the accident. It simply says "the wind did it".
But the Airbus explanation chart that says wind changes cause distinct individual variations before returning to parallel the initial path. The rather poor quality trace provided seems to show steadily increasing divergences all the way from the start.
Then there's a whole lot of stuff about the lights and what might theoretically have been visible in those conditions, but although they survived without major injuries, not a word about what the pilots recalled actually seeing.
Am I the only one wondering whether if this had been in Asia or some other regions, this report would have been greeted with a certain amount of derision by many ppruners??