I have 3 points-
1. In a good copy of the video, one can easily see another set of recognition lights above & ahead of the accident airplane. They are not a video artifact of any sort. They continue after the explosion. Doesn't seem to be causative, just interesting.
2. A route a little to the North or especially the South would have taken the accident airplane away from the highest part of the mountains. Being familiar with the area, perhaps the pilot planned to avoid the mountain that way.
3. Has anyone tried flying under the Las Vegas outer class B shelf on the Southwest side of the airspace in the dark? That certainly set off a Terrain Warning in my 430! (I learned big time from that.) The outer edge of it turns out to be awfully close to the rocks. It is much worse than the situation on the East side of the Phoenix class B.
What you said in the Brazilian case also fits the Concorde accident. I think most people would find that the real fault was in the design of the plane. The fact that a simply blown tire could damage the fuel system (& potentially lead to a fire) had been known & ignored by the plane's designers & operators for years. But as if for national pride, the French courts sometimes fail to blame high profile French corporations. A good example of which is the finding in the 1988 Paris Air Show crash of an A320 where it failed to climb after performing a low pass & crashed into trees. The pilot who claimed the new fly-by-wire system had failed to accept his throttle input, was found guilty & sentenced to prison time. It is incomprehensible to me that a well trained pilot would allow his plane to fly into trees when all he had to do was increase power. But that's what the courts said.
