Wow..very unfortunate, you have a split second to make a decision and to go around isn't always the first thought.
It should be. Especially at OSH with multiple aircraft landing on the same runway. What is the point of not taking the safest option? Keep it flying and survive to try again. Forcing an aircraft onto a runway or tying to perfectly nail a dot, is the leading cause of problems when I sit "on the beach" and watch arrivals. Folks need to remember the point of the dots is to give enough spacing for simultaneous landings. It's not a spot landing competition.
Watched a lovely Luscome have a prop strike on 27 a few years ago because you could see he was about three feet high at the dot and he shoved the stick forward. If he'd have just landed ten feet after the dot, nothing bad would have come of it at all. See about 50 great porpoises from folks "diving for the dot" every year. Don't dive. Land normally. If it really isn't going to work, just go around.
The biggest wtf in my mind is the amended landing clearance was to land 1500' SOONER, not later. If he was setting up for green dot and was then given orange on 27, I could see him pushing the nose over/touching down hot trying to get it down earlier than he was setting up for, but slowing into a stall at 250' agl? That's something I might expect if told to touch down 1500' LATER and he tried to milk it without adding power.
I sincerely hope the one critical passenger pulls through. Ultimately this just sounds like a moment of stress/panic on the part of the pilot.
Yeah the whole story still doesn't make sense, and there's some significant ($) motivation to keep it that way.
In hours and hours of listening to LiveATC and directly with the handheld while watching approaches on the field, it's exceedingly rare for the controllers at OSH to change you to a closer dot. They're almost always shooting for putting everyone on the dot closest to the numbers and only change it when things stack up.
A few of the braver controllers will give the far dot to someone fairly late and then start repeating "keep it flying, add power, don't land" over and over to the pilot to get them over the runway traffic they're "hopping over" and other controllers will just tell 'em to go around.
None will do it if they don't think the aircraft they're hopping to the next dot isn't listening or isn't responding to instructions.
I think I've heard them switch someone to a closer dot only a handful of times and usually while they're still quite a ways out on final and the guy they were going to hop over, got off into the grass expeditiously.
I did get a chuckle on Monday when it got all fouled up and the controller just said, "everyone landing 27, go around, everyone go around, we will work you back into the downwind and figure this out, sorry guys". At least he admitted it and turned something that had gotten weird spacing-wise into something orderly.
The whole thing makes a lot more sense once you've seen it from the ground. The locations, altitudes, etc... all create an orderly flow that doesn't put aircraft head to head if people pay attention to the landmarks and know where they are supposed to be.
The worst traffic conflict at OSH is a 27 departure that doesn't read the outbound altitude restriction on the NOTAM and climbs right through the crosswind traffic inbound from Fisk. That's always a cringe-worthy moment when viewed from the camp chair. Second most cringe-worthy is when they're sequencing warbirds into the final from the island and someone turns base in front of them for 27. That always gets a flurry of "go around go around go around" from the controllers.
