hedge36, it's becoming clear what happened here - problems developed for which there were no stick-and-rudder guys aboard, and indeed there is no stick-and-ruddering to be done with this flying cybernetic organism. I guarantee that what happened is, the pilots flew the airplane into the ocean while dicking around with the flight manager. They had little time to react, and they pissed it away trying to reconnect the AP or some such IT task better left to H1Bs. I'll eat my ailerons if that's not what happened. The airplane, the philosophy of "computers are cheaper than pilots", is a disaster.
What you need is an airplane with high wing loading that will not turn into a falling leaf if the computer that flies it, decides to fart to the north instead of to the south.