BOAC above presented a report from Der Spiegel that a certain Prof. Huettig had re-created the incident in the simulator - the THS went up and stayed there - curtains. This seems to me to be the smoking gun in this crash.
I take these kind of breaking news reports with a grain of salt.
I have played arround with some manufacurer's simulators trying to recreate scenarios and some interesting things happened. After some anaysis of the surprise it was mostly the limitation or programmng of the simulator that was causing the reaction. So ... I'm not ready to accept the reported facts in the Der Spiegel report as useful until the BEA completes their analysis.
Page after page of this discussion convinces me that somewhere one of you is going to be lucky and guess at some smoking gun contributor but until the total picture is put in perspective by the BEA I'm not about to scream for a corrective definied action.
Meanwhile carry on with helping us understand how the thing is supposed to work