At the risk of repeating the same things ad infinitum, the technical fault merely gave them the opportunity to cock it up, but didn't cause the crash.
As BOAC said, earlier reports suggest the approach was a little hot & high, & it seems that ATC will be rightly criticised at least a little for this scenario, sometimes you can be just a little "too clever" & my experience of AMS is that this is not unheard of.
Finally the 3 guys sitting there either collectively, or perhaps more likely the most senior guy alone, but with no prompting from the "lower ranks" (and we can write a whole thread on that
) failed to notice that the A/T was not participating as it should have as the speed reduced to VRef and subsequently failed to apply the thrust manually in a timely fashion.
The subsequent stall recovery was greatly hindered by the A/T still being in "retard" mode, but unfortunately it is the "retard" mode of the crew that finalised the outcome here.
It gives me no joy to criticise fellow professionals, but whatever the (in all honesty very minor) tech problem they had, or stress/distractions caused by line training/rushed approach, one of the most basic parameters of flying an approach was ignored.
No amount of whitewash can excuse this, and anyone who is a professional pilot will agree, unless there is some national pride taking precedence in their judgement of this situation.
Aforementioned "pride" may well be an unspoken contributor to lack of intervention earlier on P2's part, but that won't be mentioned.
Still no mention either at this stage of the duties worked by the crew in the preceding days, but when I see the roster currently being offered to applicants to Turkish Airlines it is not impossible the guys were a bit knackered as well. That surely will be looked at, although there are rumours of a cover up of these facts already circulating among Turkish pilots.