Originally Posted by
underfire
They did let the CVR go, and certainly had time to rehearse the story.
How can this be in anyway mistaken?
Well, obviously it can. Or are you suggesting that they correctly identified the taxiway and decided to try and land on it anyway?
If the NTSB report is correct, in essence;
the crew has denied being on the taxiway,
denied seeing aircraft on the taxiway, and
denied outside input that influenced their decision to go around.
Not at all. If the NTSB report is correct then they didn't recall seeing aircraft. That doesn't mean they saw no aircraft, it just means that what they did see didn't look like aircraft, it probably looked like a bunch of confusing lights. Obviously they didn't think they were on the taxiway because if they did they wouldn't have been there
. No doubt they realised afterwards they were on the taxiway, but hindsight is an awesome thing.
As professionals, you are both so dog tired after a 6 hour flight that you are incoherant to land the aircraft? What part of being a professional is that?
Forget about the 400 pax, right? They all have the expectation that the people driving will get them there and are professionals. According to all the posts with excuses, the drivers were tired because it is such a lousey profession, great excuse. Its okay, just like the one who drove it into the mountain on purpose, he was real tired too.
Obviously we don't know if this crew were tired or fatigued or whatever, however, your statements on the issue betray a large amount of ignorance on the subject. Fatigue is not black and white. You are not either fatigued or not fatigued. Likewise with being tired or just having low arousal levels. If pilots refused to fly whenever they were the slightest bit fatigued, tired, or in a low point in their circadian rhythm, half the flights in the world would be grounded.
We must accept
some deterioration in our performance on a regular basis otherwise we would all stay home and the aviation industry would stop. The question then is how much fatigue/tiredness/etc is acceptable? There are no hard and fast rules, everyone is different, and a big problem is that it is very difficult to predict at the start of a duty, how you will feel by the end of it.
I fly back of the clock freight all of the time and know my personal signs of fatigue. Things like asking for a checklist associated with the last type I flew rather than the current one, being slower, having a narrower focus on a task leading to poorer situational awareness, and being less critical of my own performance and that of my colleague. I do my very best to only work if I believe I am fit for duty but I don't have a crystal ball and cannot predict my future performance with 100% accuracy. One consequence of fatigue of course is a decline in the ability to make good decisions. The fatigued pilot is therefore more likely to make a poor decision about whether they are in fact fit to fly.
I am not making excuses for the AC crew, I don't know how they mistook a taxiway for a runway any more than you do, but I'm pretty sure they didn't deliberately attempt to land on a taxiway. I'm also pretty sure that if this crew were told about this incident happening to someone else they'd be just as disbelieving as we are. Something screwed up their mental model and it is much more valuable to be open to explanations (not excuses) so that we can learn something from it, rather than just sitting back, pointing, and saying "you screwed the pooch!"