Bearfoil and xcitation:
I fully agree that the pilots did not have a cakewalk presented to them. And in my previous posts I have always pointed out that things could have been quite chaotic on the flight deck, AB's stall warning was not their friend, and that from a very early point in the three-minute scenario, the plane may have been unrecoverable.
But that said, it does not appear that any concerted attempt was made to try the only thing that might have saved the plane once the sh__ had hit the fan at the top of the zoom climb, and that was sustained nose-down and trade some altitude for airspeed.
The question we face is "why?" Lack of training? Lack of non-AP flying experience? Lack of appropriate CRM? Or did the normal thought processes of the PF, PNF and Captain just simultaneously "freeze?" What I don't see is any way to lay the cause completely at AB's door. Surely the stall warning logic could be improved, but no piece of equipment is always infailable. Something will always go wrong, and that's why we have pilots. We have to figure out why they failed -- exactly at the time when the equipment/software failed -- and figure out what we need to do to fix it.
Last edited by SeenItAll; 5th Aug 2011 at 12:09.