I’d love to re-read the report but the ATSB has removed it from the website. The original report is so old, it was at least 3 laptops ago for me and I’ve long since discarded the paper copies that I worked from at the time.
Not the behaviour one expects from a body such as the ATSB with impartial transparent processes.
I’m sure this is an attempt by the ATSB to frustrate comparisons of the last report with the soon to be published (??) new report. But equally, I trust that the pprune community will have saved copies that we can use at the time.
I was in the Ansett 737 SIM recently and we landed it in zero visibility hand flying using the ILS. But it occurs to me that airline pilots using SIMS for recurrent training get to do some things beyond the normal limits like that.
On the other hand, a relatively young charter pilot’s experience is likely to only ever have involved doing training in real aircraft doing real approaches and being smacked every time he broke minima by so much as 50 ft.
I still reckon it’s a tough call to say he didn’t make an optimal decision. Everyone survived. I’d rather focus on the information upon which he relied to get to that point.
In the Sullenberger accident, I believe they put a number of pilots in SIMS to see if they did better. It would be an interesting excercise to see what they would do given the same met information and ATC directions. I’ll bet the ATSB don’t do it.