Just to redeem my fellow journalists: The leap from
“The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,” said a person who is familiar with American officials’ preliminary assessment, which includes an analysis of information extracted from the plane’s damaged flight-data recorder.
to those headlines is not as big as some here like to make us believe. That is a very specific statement in regard to action and effect made by someone who's seen inside information.
Actually, the reality might be even less exact, and this might read more like:
“The plane did what we read back from what the sensors of the cockpit flight controls registered on the FDR."
The CVR could give the additional info, whether the movements of the cockpit flight controls (represented by the sensor values) are caused by human inputs. Of course not in a 1:1 relationship, though qualitatively.