I've been thinking about where BEA is likely to be going in their investigations of the human factors aspect of this accident.
I suspect the words 'cognitive fixation' will factor significantly into their report. (In French of course.
)
In the course of reading up on the subject, I found that there are some simulation tools for predicting this type of problem and quantifying it.
Here is a 6 year old paper on aviation related work in this direction.
http://www.humanfactors.illinois.edu...ulebleiwic.pdf
Now if they were to take this set of models and apply it to the piloting tasks faced by the crew of AF447 that night there might be some clarity to the perplexing question of how they let the aircraft get away from them.
Of course with the CVR, DFDR and possibly ?? the high resolution recorder yielding information, that may be overkill. I think we have teased all the information from the initial BEA note that can be extracted at this point.