Originally Posted by Old Carthusian
I realise that some of us don't really want to go in this direction (I am a pilot too but not on big jets) but to understand this accident I would suggest it is necessary to leave no stone unturned no matter how painful it is. Some have already shown this aversion to commenting on the pilots and I have to regretfully submit that this is not the right approach.
I can't speak for others. I have, for myself, figured that the pilots did some things which appear to be disastrously wrong. Now, they either both had a really bad hangover or other form of really bad day or something led them to commit errors all the while thinking they were the correct thing to do.
The former case is unprovable. We can look at other issues to resolve the situation. Can we answer the "why" questions for "entering the storm", "pulling up on the stick in response to disconnects", "continuing the same errors after the second stall warning", and others?
It looks to me like a training error led to the pull ups, especially after the plane spuriously (with perhaps no accurate remedy possible) dropped the stall warnings when the measurable air speeds dropped to or below 60 knots. With that revised AirBus stall training syllabus I'm inclined to look to the training issue as the most serious one other than the pitot probes, of course.
But, that's just my hypothesis. There could be a real wiring problem, as unlikely as I see it, involved to compound the problems. There could be other problems that could have lead to the stall and led to it not being diagnosed in time. So that's what we're all discussing.