Every aircraft accident has more than one cause (it seems). I agree that the crew violated some very basic principles of aircraft control and I am just a guy with a single engine ticket. One thing I know from my business (not related to flying), which has complex control systems, is that once an operator becomes confused or disoriented the recovery/action time is significantly longer than “normal”. If this flight crew wound up fighting each other then all bets are off.
I am waiting for the input from a family friend who has a long career flying 737’s in the US. He is very conservative in his comments and is very concerned about these incidents. His last comment to me was “What else is Boeing not telling us?”
As a side I watched the Air Disasters show last night on the 777 crash at SFO. The upshot was the guy flying the plane had a few thousand hours on a 320 and had NEVER made a non-instrument landing in a 777. Two senior captains managed to confuse the 777 control system to where it disabled the auto-throttle feature.
My wife and I both loved roller coasters and had season passes to Magic Mountain, Disneyland and Universal Studios in the early 1990s So we used to fly our airplane from the Seattle area to LA a couple times a month to take advantage of those passes. One time my wife and I were flying back from LA, and we ended up going through some very nasty weather starting in Northern California. At one point we were flying about 500 feet over I-5, we had been getting bounced around till our eyeballs could hardly see straight, it was very dark and it was raining so hard that the visibility was very bad. This finally broke my wife; she started crying, and yelling that she would rather be giving birth again and she was convinced we were going to die...
It hit home at that point that it is a combination of factors that takes a small plane down in bad weather. Every weather report I got and was getting was over the radio was completely inaccurate. The plane was a handful because of the turbulence. I was trying to keep an eye on the GPS, and looking at charts to get ATIS and airport frequencies and keep from running into something solid. She was having a fit and then we started running low on gas. So I thought that we would just land somewhere, get some gas, take a rest and maybe spend the night.
The runway we were based at was surrounded by trees but had these little 20 watt bulbs that came on at dusk and gave just enough light to land safely. So we came to the first airport that I thought that we would land at, but all the lights were off, so another 20 miles further and there was another airport and all its lights were off too. Then I remembered that you had to turn the lights on at these little unattended airports by flicking the transmitter 5 times on the airport frequency. I forgot that because of all the crap going inside and outside the plane. If we had been really low on fuel it could have been a tragic mistake.
Anyway, we landed at the third airport and got some gas and my wife calmed down and it stopped raining so we decided to keep on going. But within half an hour we were back in the same type of messy weather... it was like it followed us all the way from Northern California. When we landed at our airport there was thunder and lightning and about a 20 knot crosswind, we had to do a go around. Then as we were getting out of the plane at our hangar some guy drove up with his high beams on blinding us.
I thought it was the sheriff checking to see who would be landing in such awful weather at our little Podunk airport, and to see if we needed any help. But it was some drunk guy in a 4 wheel drive pickup. And he yelled, “How much money do you have to have to fly an airplane like that?” I was in no mood and was ready to tear his face off, so I just said, “Get the hell out of here!!!” It think that his plan was to rob us but he sensed the homicidal tone in my voice and yelled some obscenities and left.