Akerosid...Having flown Glass 767/757 for 10years
and Dc3, HS 748,F27 and (L1011 for 14years) I can appreciate the information overload that pilots can experiance in unusual
Non normals!
Landings into areas of reduced visability close to large forest fires must be one!
It is difficult to plan ahead and stick to any plan if things are changeing fast and you become distracted by events outside or inside the cockpit.
I found it helped to only "Priority list" the relevent information I needed to the circumstances.
I tryed to stick to IFR flying and SOPS and avoid offers that I thought could rapidly overload me and my Fo or could rapidly deteriorate, into a "Visit to the office situation."
In fact it became such a habit that I often ran my off duty days when nackered on a Priorities list.
With Boeing glass there is a large amount of information flooding in and the Airbus has more.
Consider this, in a planned Vnav descent in an Airbus, GF072 got high and fast, with all the information available, how could this happen?
DME was available, so was all the glass, the weather was good, everything was working normally, and the pilots were at a familiar home base.
IMHO..What was initially wrong was the pilots were not trained to be up to speed on their Priorities for safe flight and were involved in non essentials, they took their eye off the descent planning and subsequent profile errors were not responded to positively with sufficient urgency. Once priorities slipped other factors caused the whole thing to unravel as the report shows.
I found the more modern the airliner.... It needed to be flown with even more disciplin than the old.
The poor old pilot now needed to be hard wired and interface himself not only with his computers, BUT additionally he also needed to still be interfaced through his backside to the basics of old fashioned airmanship and the real outside world which would kill him when the outside support groups failed to accommodate the precision of his super modern programmed computers.
For example the descent profile and track was amended by ATC,
Or the approach was changed at the last minute to a different runway with only non precision aids available.
Various options suddenly being offered on approaches to different runways at the last minute after a 10hours night duty with a two man crew.
When this occured you might as well be back flying the DC3 although moveing a lot faster.
It then all came back to servival flying and priorities to stay alive and out of the office.
I hope this helps,it is very difficult to put young heads on old shoulders and vv.
As you can imagine I also thought the flight engineers made for a safer flight in non normal situations in strange areas of the world.
Cheers Scan