This was awful to read. The control tower repeatedly warned them about their trajectory, and even advised them to discontinue the approach. I can't even imagine how awful it must've been to those aboard who placed their trust in the pilots.
A go around for an unstable approach is 100% the decision of the pilots, because they have the complete picture. They also know the stability requirements of the operator and speed limits of the plane, ATC doesn't know those.
So while ATC can think "wow he is very fast for an A320" or "that looks too high" they cannot see what the actual airspeed is, they cannot see whether the gear is down or not or what the flap settings are. And they don't know the speed limits for each specific type. All they know is roughly how fast the typical plane of that type normally goes.
If you read the report, it seems they were in contact with the approach controller who contacted the tower for landing clearance on their behalf.
Tower and approach have a button to talk directly in each other's headsets, so it's easy for approach to give you a landing clearance on behalf of the tower. Or the other way around, tower could get you radar instructions from approach in case you have a problem right after take off and want to return immediately.
But in this case it was a very bad decision to do that.
This is an aviation rule that everyone lives by. There are many reasons for why that is the most sane and sensible approach to this problem, in addition to what is mentioned, the pilot's attention span is always under attack from various events that they have to correctly and swiftly respond to. This does not happen sometimes, this happens all the time during flight. Everyone has to be prepared for it. It is part of the job. You have to train for it, you have to prepare for your attention to be overflown, and you still have to make the most important decisions even under those conditions.
And this has an important consequence: ATC is at the end of that list ("communicate"). They are at the bottom of the attention span chain of the pilot, and it is better for everyone if ATC knows this and acts like it. In other words, leaves the final decision to the pilot.
Please don't get me wrong. The pilots bear the majority of the responsibility. But it does not sound to me like ATC did their job properly, either.
It is on them regardless. ATC performed badly, and it blew one or two chances to say something that might have saved the day, but it was the pilots who actually caused the accident, through their own free choices of action - nothing that ATC did influenced their decision-making (quite the opposite, in fact.) ATC deserves criticism and blame, but it is different in kind to that which belongs to the pilots.
Controllers on the other hand has years of training about traffic patterns, communications, managing airspace, etc. Most controllers are not pilots, although a significant number are, even those are not likely to be flying around A320s recreationally. Needless to say they deal with thousands of types of aircraft every day and may have only general ideas of how those aircraft may perform.
So, who is in a really good position to quickly know what the critical speeds in a landing are?
Yes, the pilot is in control of the aircraft, but unless and until an emergency is declared, ATC is in control of the airspace, and the pilots should obey any safe command.
Don't get me wrong, the pilots bear the majority of the responsibility, but ATC did not do their job properly, either.
That said, ATC's responsibility is to keep planes from hitting each other and maintain an orderly flow of aircraft. They are not any way responsible for the safety of the flight. That is what the second pilot and all of the automated alarms are for. The crew just ignored all of them.
It takes a basic standard of professionalism to fly a jet airliner, and unfortunately neither of the crew members on this flight had it. The approach was so bad that they were above the maximum gear extension speed when they tried to put the gear down, and so the Airbus refused to do it, and continuously yelled at them that it was doing this, but somehow they failed to notice.
Monitoring airspeed on approach is about the most basic thing a pilot does, and if you're off on speed and/or altitude by much less than these guys were, the absolutely clear requirement is to go around and try again (before you slam the engines on the ground and destroy them).
If ATC is to blame in this, it is primarily in excessive deference to the PIC.
If ATC is to blame in this, it is primarily in excessive deference to the PIC.
My point, exactly, though it sounds like there may have been other irregularities in the procedures followed.
ATC should have said "go around" to a plane with no functioning engines?
In this case, according to the preliminary report, `“Karachi Approach” advised repeatedly (twice to discontinue the approach`. Had the cowboy pilots followed that instruction, the unnecessary deaths might have been avoided.
In the case here, approach instructed them to abort the approach, and the pilots should have. Well, they paid the ultimate price for their mistakes, taking many people with them.
The main criticism in the report seems to be that they did not report the lack of landing gear or the subsequent engine strike back to the aircraft.
My criticism, having listened to some of the recording, is that ATC were not more insistent in their instructions. Every other ATC recording I've listened to, ATC instructs and pilots obey. In the rare cases where pilots disobey without immediate good reason, ATC usually gets quite heated. They don't generally just acquiesce.
So, don't get me wrong, the pilots bear the majority of the responsibility, but pilots and ATC are a team, and ATC didn't do a great job either.
They don't bother you in terms of how you fly your own plane. That's captains responsibility in the US at least. The controller was getting into the go around game here (too high / too fast stuff). The CAPTAIN is supposed to monitor and establish the stabilized approach.
For reasons that are not clearly explained (probably everything happening too fast and muddled), they remained in contact with approach during the landing after the approach controller got their landing clearance from tower on the phone.
Tower did report the gear-up landing to approach, but approach did not relay to the crew.