Right, but what I mean is that it shouldn’t be possible to skip those steps and have things coincidentally work because of the state the plane was left in. I’m not a pilot or even much of an aviation geek, so maybe I’m misunderstanding the description of this incident, but it sounds to me like this crew did what they always do, and that normally works fine, but this time it didn’t.
There isn't much in these planes that works "coincidentally" because of a previous flight -- almost all important state has to be reconfigured each flight. The article is over-indexing on the flight director's altitude setting. These guys missed many basic things, like rotating at V1 speed and in general monitoring the plane's situation.
You rotate at Vr, not V1. Vr is almost always close to V1, though. The 777's flight computer can calculate all 3 (V1, Vr, V2) for you, put them on the speed tape (on the left of the Primary Flight Display), and audibly call them out.
There’s a lot that goes into deciding how and what tasks to do, how quickly, at what points in flight, and those numbers change as winds, weather, traffic, and fuel burn changes. Each flight, the pilots need to basically take all the factors going into the flight (# passengers, bags, cargo weight, routing, taxi time, and so on) to figure out how much fuel to use, what particular climb profile they’ll use, and a bunch more.
It makes sense that there’d be a “clean cockpit” magic button to push, but not only would the magic button need to be tested in every aspect of flight, in every configuration, in every combination of working and broken sensors… but airplanes are flippin’ complex, and flying modern airliners as part of an airline is even more complex.
