I remember a statement that the Captain announced (en francais) 'this is a stall' or similar. That must have been in a newspaper 'leak' as I can't now find it. Odd, but the leaks seem to have stopped.
Actually the opposite, as reported by
AVweb:
"At no point" on the cockpit voice recorder "is the word stall ever mentioned," Chief Investigator Alain Bouillard said in an interview.
So one can reasonably conclude that the crew did not know that they were in a stall.
