it was the spiral dive the pilot went into after he uncoupled the failed auto pilot.
Has this been verified by a video recording of the cockpit?
I say this because AP disconnection is done by a red button in the yoke and normally one holds the yoke when the button is being pressed - partly because that is totally normal and partly because most GA APs don't fly with perfect elevator trim so when you disconnect it, there is a bit of trimming to do manually.
But everybody who flies (for real, not in a sim) with an AP knows all this anyway....
One doesn't disconnect the AP and without taking even a glimpse at the AI starts to rummage around on the back seat
He was relying on the auto pilot to do the work.
Rightly so - that is what it is there for
While we don't hear of aeroplanes crashing all over the world because of automation complacency there has been a relative increase in loss of control accidents in IMC due to the pilots showing marked reluctance to disengage the automatics and recover manually from an unusual attitude.
Hang on... you are saying that the
AP (not the pilot) puts the plane into an UA (which generally means an
AP failure) and the pilot just sits there? Did you get this from some CAA leaflet on proper airmanship, written by an ex RAF navigator?
One can stall a plane by doing a low power setting descent and when the AP levels off at the preset altitude, the airspeed bleeds off (Turkish 737 at Amsterdam kind of thing) and a pilot who is well behind the plane might not notice. But that is not an "UA" in the normal sense, and a recovery from that isn't going to pull the wings off.
I agree one needs to be able to fly a plane manually, because automatic controls do fail. But the general way that cockpit automation is persistently tarred with a big brush shows a lack of understanding of how modern avionics work and how they are used in real flight.