A lot of us don't get a choice. Outlawing visuals seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater to me. IMHO, what's needed isn't further restricting what pilots can do, but improving training, oversight, etc. so that we are capable of and competent at using any of the various tools at our disposal. There's nothing inherently dangerous about a visual approach, under the proper conditions (I'm sure you'd agree, as I'd wager you've done more than a few of them). We've been doing them for, what, over a century? IMHO, we don't need to demand more assistance from all the various bells, whistles, and regulatory agencies, we need to demand better performance from ourselves and our training orthodoxies. And that's not a bag on this crew, necessarily. Maybe they were fatigued, or maybe it was their first flight in to a totally unfamiliar airport (I believe the Branson airport opened for business in the last few years) and they got busy with any of the other million things you can get busy with and just didn't have time to properly check their position, or hell, maybe the FMS said that WAS the right airport. Maybe it was the first visual they'd done for a really long time because they normally DO fly an ILS everywhere they go and they got sloppy because "visual approach" isn't something that's covered in the sim. Who knows? Anything is possible at this point.
But I rather think that further restrictions and automation-dependence are not solutions to incidents like this, whatever the particulars. If the airplane can't get to the right runway on a legal visual approach, IMHO, the fault almost certainly does not lie with the regulatory authorities.
