If that is a finding, to my way of thinking, the pilots might not have responsibility for this accident at all.....
Lyman, I think you are stretching a bit too far there.
Look at the nose pitch behavior: it appears that the crew on the flight deck did not correct the nose attitude, nor maintain assigned altitude, within normal parameters during the early course of the malfunction, before it became something worse. It began as a comparatively mundane malfunction of a system known in the past to have some vulnerabilities. It does not appear that the malfunction they were faced with was novel, nor a "first time in class" malfunction.
Given that with similar malfunctions, most crews in 30+ similar events, who dealt with attitude and altitude excursions of varying magnitude ...
- got their planes sorted out
- remained flying
- remained unstalled
- prevented a malfunction from becoming an emergency.
then this crew's inability to do so stands out.
I do not wish to disrespect the dead, but I think that, with some of the info available to us via released CVR extracts, the crew has at least some responsibility, even if a BEA conclusion is reached that training, command decisions by the captain, documentation, systemic problems at Air France, probe replacement schedules, et cetera, are major contributing factors.
That "zoom climb" is to me doubly inexplicable, given that the crew were very aware of their altitude limitations for that sector of the route. Their discussion was recorded, to the effect that actual versus forecast temps at altitude did not permit a climb to a higher altitude that they had planned for (or left as an option) before takeoff.
The Airspeed was unreliable, but Altitude was not.
I cannot think of a professional airline pilot who considers a 1000 or 2000 foot altitude deviation (no less a 3000 foot deviation) as something other than very serious, and in need of immediate correction unless something else very untoward is also occurring at the same time.