[anthonyvd]

The weather was deteriorating, and it looks like it might have been better at Fort Lauderdale from the weather map. If you're suspecting an issue with the instrument approach equipment and you're low on fuel, you might want to divert to somewhere with better weather to minimize the likelihood of having to execute a second go around and getting in a situation where you don't have enough fuel for a diversion.

For instance, if they have enough fuel to get to Fort Lauderdale and the weather there allows for a visual approach, diverting there gives them a lot more options in the case of malfunctioning instruments.

I'm just a private pilot without an instrument rating, but this diversion doesn't seem crazy to me.

[flkiwi]

I feel like there was a "lost in translation" issue with the way they phrased the diversion. My assumption was that they didn't have enough fuel to attempt another landing in Tampa AND THEN to divert if it failed (which, given the deteriorating conditions, seems reasonable). The diversion is the least weird part of this story to me too.

Unless they became fixated on the causeway thinking it was the runway--I live here and that runway is not heavily used for commercial flights, so it might simply have been a familiarity issue even for someone regularly flying into TPA--I cannot for the life of me figure out why they ended up where they were. Just a bizarre situation, unless the weather was so bad that they got task saturated and didn't know what was happening.

I did wonder to myself whether they were lucky to be flying a MAX8 due to the power of the engines--an older plane might have taken longer to stop the descent.