You raise several good points Arney.

Regarding the lack of warning, I'm not sure what could be done about that. It appears the pilots thought they could manage the landing, or else do a go around, until seconds before impact. The message there (for me at least) is that takeoffs and landings are always critical times. I try to stay alert and make sure my belt is extra tight. I'm also not sure what could have been done differently regarding the ejected crew. The tail section was ripped off the plane, and apparently both of the fatalities were sitting in that section. Also I believe at least one of the crew in that section was severly injured.

The two aspects I find most troubling are the pilots delaying the evacuation and the escape slides inflating inside. The pilots knew they had just had a severe crash and everything I've ever heard about crashes is to get out as fast as possible. I think that was clearly an error on the pilots part, and I hope pilots in the future will take a lesson from that. Regarding the slides inflating inside, one account I read indicated that the NTSB crash examiners plan to investigate that. We may eventually see some improvements in escape slides as a result.

I'm sure seconds seemed like minutes and minutes seemed like hours to the people laying on the runway. One account I read said that the ambulances were sent to a nearby staging point and then dispatched to patients as the Fire/EMS folks triaged patients and called for transport. This would all be appropriate under ICS. All accounts I've read indicate the the hospitals thought the triage was handled extremely well. I've never been involved in a real Mass Casualty Incident, but I have had some MCI training. A MCI will by its very nature tend to initially be chaotic and overwhelm emergency responders. The key is to quickly separate the dead, from the severly injured, from the walking wounded. Meanwhile mobilize more resources and focus them first on those for whom you can do the most good. Given that only two people died, the responders clearly did some things right.

I think we should also look at the positive aspects. An airliner with 307 people crashed, had its tail ripped off, and burned. Yet only 2 died. Of the 305 survivers I think about 180 went to the hospital, but most of those have already been released. I think there were about 30 with severe injuries. The death toll could easily have been much more severe. Clearly a lot of things worked well.