At any rate, assuming the presentation was reasonably accurate, it noted that the head pilot,
Captain Dubois
after returning to the cockpit, was initially confused about what was going on, but eventually figured it out and started telling the Pilot Flight to push the nose down.
Before the Captain returned to the flight deck, the First Officer, Mr Robert, had on a couple of occasions (per the CVR transcript available), advised the flying pilot, Mr Bonin, to "go down" (which I think he meant as lower the nose). The transcript and FDR suggest that Bonin never held the nose down long enough to make enough difference in terms of getting the AoA away from "stall" and toward "flying."
Did the PF ignore him,
The PF was task saturated and well behind the aircraft by the time Captain Dubois arrived. That much seems clear based on the report's findings. Some of the Captain's initial directions to Mr Bonin included help in keeping the wings level ... see the CVR transcript. This makes some sense if what he thought (initially) was the problem was the pilot needing to recover from an unusual attitude ... leveling the wings is usually the first step in that recovery to level flight ...
was it already too late (
not enough altitude to recover), or was the aircraft in such a deep stall that it couldn't recover (or at least not recover without exceptional pilot skill)?
Hard to say, but probably true. That point in particular received pages and pages of treatment in the various AF 447 threads. You'll want to read the ones after the CVR transcript came out.
Given the AoA and the time Captain Dubois had to assess, and then try to correct, the flight condition when he arrived, every second that he was not actively directin recovery from stall inputs was a second lost to the eventual point of "no return." (At what point did he realize that the plane was stalled? Hard to say).
As CRM seems to have broken down between the other two pilots before he arrived, he was greeted with a confused situation that he tried to untangle ... and I'd say he ran out of time.
The poignant "it is not possible" (in Fr,
impossible) remark points to him not believing something ... such as
This plane is stalled
and / or
These two geniuses were given a plane in straight and level flight and we are not flying straing level
and/ or
We are falling at what rate of descent????
There are any number of things that, having arrived on the flight deck and tried to sort out the problem, were so far beyond what he expected to find that it took some time/effort to overcome.
Time he didn't have.