Originally Posted by Sykes

It's super easy to underestimate the impact of "just one more thing" during a high workload situation. One time when I went to my annual recurrent training (I fly a jet, but not for airlines) I got to observe as the instructor piled on a bunch of small problems to intentionally task saturate the pilots, and every single one of them, regardless of experience level, reached a point where even the smallest thing--a dropped pencil, someone calling about a problem in the cabin, etc.--caused them to start making safety-critical mistakes.

I definitely agree that it would have been better if they could have found time to notify passengers, but I've also been in the kind of situation where even on a challenging but mostly routine flight I could feel my task saturation rising and had to tune out non-critical tasks--if it wasn't on the checklist or a baseline part of flying it wasn't happening. (Tunnel-vision is also a risk here, but we don't need to dive too much into that.) It's not that I was overwhelmed, but I knew that if I didn't manage my workload I wouldn't have enough spare capacity to deal with a legitimate emergency if one did occur (and even deciding which non-critical tasks to perform adds to workload). There's a reason that crew resource management is a massive part of the FAA's safety initiatives--it's a critical part of the failure chain in almost every accident. And after a flight like that you're often fried and need to spend the downtime getting ready for the next one.