At the risk of making myself appear more foolish than I already have, I feel compelled to offer an observation;
Some time back, in one of these threads, someone posted a link to some utubes of some Airbus simulator training in progress. At the time, probably because I've had very little experience in the pointy end during flight, I was struck by the "automaton" nature of the behaviours I saw. I thought it truly looked as though pilots had become mere accessories to the computers, with little room for thought and/or any sense of actually "piloting" their machines.
It looked to me, as I watched the gents twiddling knobs and going through checklists and pecking away at keys, that these sorts of pilots had been programmed to deal with their jobs as a computer tech might with his network administration tasks.
It struck me that these were not at all like the pilots of old who could fly any big old bird with several broken bits and malfunctioning whatnots, because they knew the basics of keeping their machine in it's element.
"Two kinds of pilot" I thought. "Old" and "New". "Old" could fly almost anything with wings, but not a newer, glass and computer machine. "New" could fly the computer generation "smart" birds, but probably not an old DC3.
I'm still mulling over those distinctions, but it has occurred to me more recently that this particular airplane needed both kinds of pilot, and the two "New" types that were in the seats just had none of the abilities of that "Old" type. I simply cannot fathom any of the type "Old" failing to recognize a stall. ... at any point during a 35000ft descent.
This is exactly right, confirming what I suspected all along, and it is appalling in a way no other crash has ever been - a perfectly recoverable situation, an airplane without any problems flying, 80% thrust and 3 deg nose up, and wait for the sun.. they crashed this airplane because they were not even pilots, they were confused computer administrators, something I have seen in real time, without the human cargo to disperse among the fishes.
I will never, in my life, set foot on another 'Bus. I can't trust it to be actually piloted.