At that point it was just belt-and-braces to make sure it's off. Unlike the FD there is a distinct and specific FDR trace for AP disengagement and it remains OFF throughout the sequence.
It's possible that the Captain had fallen back to a mental mode where he was attempting checklists by rote and simply double-checking all of the points he could remember. Perhaps he was disorientated and misidentified the selector.
In any case as far as the aircraft systems were concerned, the AP was OFF and stayed off.
As to your other points, AF is not a state airline and Airbus is not a state institution. They are both commercial entities in which the French government has a stake - nothing more, nothing less. Hiding problems will always be a self-defeating action - McDonnell Douglas learned that lesson the hard way, and you can bet the French government took notice because the tragedy that brought the secrecy to light happened on their soil. All claims of cover-up and skullduggery on the part of the French regarding Airbus can be traced directly to a single incident where lawyers acting for a defendant in the case leaked unsubstantiated scuttlebutt to the press, who repeated it unchallenged.
Originally Posted by
Lyman
A sister ship to the 330 had an electrical short circuit in flight, and the crew lost half of their ECAM, lost Navigation, had cockpit cabin communication failure, and lost effective control of the stick, along with autopilot.
But here we have hard evidence that at least one display was functioning correctly, and no instrumentation other than airspeed was lost. You're trying to draw a false equivalency.