Bear, continuous left and right controls and pitch up control tells me he was probably not aviating properly. Most of us believe if he had held pitch and power we wouldn't be talking about this now.
The wild pull up to a nonflyable attitude put it in a deep stall, then they had no clue how to recover from a deep stall so spent several minutes with full nose up SS before impact with the Atlantic.
My students in a J3 cub with three hours knew you couldn't get out of a stall by holding the stick back.