I'm not a professional pilot but I have a lot of intuition, if you want to call it that, for what being a professional pilot would entail. I get along very well with pilots. "There but for the grace of God.." Why?
I'm actually more interested in airplanes than in flying. I'm not even that comfortable in the air these days. But I never tire of seeing aircraft, particularly large ones like the A330, defeating gravity.
And I just can't imagine a pilot who has no interest in airplanes. Well, your ass is constantly on the line, because you ere 5 to 8 miles up and your motors must keep running and your control surfaces in place and symmetrically distributed. Your ass and the rudder are one.
Now, anyone with any interest in airplanes will make some effort to understand how they work. And that means understanding how the air works, because there is no airplane without air.
But in this crash, there seems to be no interest at all in either air or airplanes - because otherwise, how would it be possible to fail to understand the simplest facts about either the atmosphere or flight dynamics? Particularly when your own personal death is the cost of ignorance?
Why would anyone get inside a machine that's going to be 8 miles above the middle of the ocean without understanding every rivet in the galley if necessary? Much less how it stalls?
I just can't understand this. And I can't understand why anyone would design an airplane with disconnected controls unless they expected the pilot to one day be redundant.