The captain knew how to fly but by the time he got to the cockpit doing his required legal rest they had things so screwed up he took a while figuring out how they could have done what they did.
Pilots should not be left alone in a cockpit if they can't handle a simple loss of airspeed problem without crashing into the ocean. The scarey part is how many flights tonight will be flown by equally unqualified pilots while the captain takes his required legal break? You are not allowed to be on duty in the cockpit for more than 8 hrs. Monitoring an autopilot for a few thousand hours at altitude does not mean you could fly it if the autopilot disconnected with no airspeed. AF447 proved that.