Just as likely is that they both felt safe with the margins since they were 'pros', but mother nature decided to throw in something totally unpredictable.
Actually, this kind of reminds me of the crashes between US Navy ships and Supertankers.
I see your point. I suspect these two guys just made a very small number of mistakes at a critical time, and they found out how unforgiving flight can be.
It is very unforgiving.
When I was in the USN, I took great interest in the publications that circulated about various accidents throughout the fleet. I came to understand that most accidents don’t involve a single mistake or malfunction. Often, it is a cascade of events that result in a loss of equipment or life.
Sometimes both.
Mishaps often start out small. Something isn’t safety wired correctly, a bolt is put in backwards, a socket is dropped and gets lost under armor plating in a belly pan, or some wire gets frayed during installation of an electrical harness due to rough handling. Nothing might come of it. The unwired bolt never loosens, the backwards bolt never gets in the way of some mechanism, that socket never flies out in an inverted flight maneuver and gets stuck in a linkage, and the wire never causes a short.
Then, at some point, the fuel control is replaced and the safety wire done right, the backwards bolt is never found, someone removes the belly pan for maintenance and the socket rolls out, and when the wiring harness is removed with some Aviation Electrician’s Mate eyeballing it and saying to his buddy “Hey, check this out...”
And then again, sometimes that bolt loosens and falls out, the backwards bolt gets stuck on a linkage, the socket flies out and hits something and the wire shorts out a system, and then the cascade is on.
The pilot may do everything right, follow all the correct NATOPS procedures, keep his cool, and get the plane on the ground.
Or sometimes the pilot, normally a pretty good one, makes a minor error and it compounds the issue. I recall reading that it is often human failure on the part of the pilot when reacting to a malfunction that takes that mishap cascade down the path to catastrophe. A minor mistake takes a serious issue and makes it a deadly issue.
It occasionally makes no difference what that pilot does, they can do everything right, but their fate is sealed by bad luck, they just happened to be the one in the pilot seat that day.
The sea is unforgiving too, but is obviously more forgiving than flight. Those ships that had those collisions with other vessels were not one or two mistakes at the wrong time, those were a cascade of events that may have begun years before with poor training, merging into various equipment and maintenance failures, compounded by a design that had holes in it that those sailors could break their ankles in.
A pilot who dies in a crippled plane due to a single frayed wire is a tragedy...it happens.
Sailors dying in a ship, doomed to be involved in a collision by its failures due to poor leadership, lax discipline, inadequate training, low staffing, and sub-par maintenance is a shame, a terrible shame.