Although I am a hard defender of the need for commercial pilots to keep
proficient and skilled in manual flying, it was sad to see that the "
investigators" and "
experts" interviewed by BBC, have passed to the general public, the idea that the Air France pilots were unable to recover from stall, because they were not trained (and not used to fly manually)...
To compare the ability of that military pilot, to recover from stall, without mentioning that there was a huge difference between doing it in a flight simulator,
with available speed information, and trying to recover a stalled
heavy bird without speed info, is intellectually dishonest.
That colonel has lost almost half of his altitude to recover from stall. I'd love to see him talking, after a couple of attempts in a heavy jet, with almost 5 tons of fuel in the trim tank and without proper speed read-outs, in turbulence and dark...