It’s dark, it’s early, you need to get a clearance from center which, I’m afraid to say, 90% of us reading this are going to screw up the sequence because if you’re a mainline pilot flying between the big airports, it’s not super cut and dry.
I can only look back to my past. Leaving TVC one morning before the tower was open, I asked my new copilot, fresh-ish out of the military, to review non-towered procedures the night before so I wouldn’t be single pilot ops on the ground and in the initial climb. I had to convince him that we needed to call Minneapolis Center for a clearance, and then a release time, were going to communicate over CTAF stating who we were, where we were taxiing, to which runway using the electronic weather we had available, consistent with the NOTAMS and it was pulling teeth.
“We don’t’ have a taxi clearance!” “We don’t need a taxi clearance, it’s uncontrolled, we state intentions over CTAF”
“Which runway are they going to give us?” “We determine the appropriate runway ourselves”
And so on and so on.
Without telling an entire story over again, I can respect a good deal of confusion and, well, even assumption that the radios are set. Is that the case here? I have no idea, but I’m more apt to give the crew the benefit of the doubt that it was just a series of small mistakes that lead up to a big one instead of intentional negligence.
Especially when I have my own experiences with going from a world of DTW/LAX/JFK/DFW/ORD/ATL and then ending up in TVC with a closed tower on a Sunday at 0500.