Originally Posted by
tdracer
Not to diminish what the pilots did on QF 72 in any way - they performed brilliantly.
But they were damn lucky it happened at 35k. Had HAL decided it wanted to kill them at 10k instead of 35k, it's unlikely they could have done anything about it.
Boeing isn't the only airframer that occasionally gets it wrong...
at 10k the result would have been the same, from memory they lost less than 700 feet in the first instance, before returning to 37k, and the second incident was not as severe.