Then they did stupid pilot stuff and rode a perfectly good airplane 35000 ft in a stall with the stall horn going
Is that distracting enough to forget there is GPS groundspeed and an iron gyro AI available for cross reference before (inexplicably) yanking and banking on the joystick?
GPS Groundspeed...Really?
Try this on your next flight. Tell your fellow airman to close his eyes and tell you what the GPS groundspeed was sometime in the last minute. Try to mentally correlate that to airspeed and make appropriate adjustments to keep your aircraft within the narrow indicated airspeed window—all when your struggling to keep things right side up. In the fear mode we don't think well.
The far better answer, one that is the standard official technique when encountering severe turbulence, is to try to hold a normal ATTITUDE. Don't chase the altitude or the airspeed (if it's working). That is much easier to grab on to, and requires no mental math. Do you
really want someone jockying the thrust levers to chase a GPS groundspeed? Compound that with the fact that if you are in this situation you're probably in an area where the wind is changing and what was a good GPS groundspeed 10 minutes ago is now 50 knots too fast or too slow—either one of which critically dangerous.
If the AF447 crew had done that, had Bonin resumed the normal pitch attitude when Robert was telling him to "go back down," we never would have heard of them.
The question is did Bonin even know what the normal attitude was without the aid of the flight director? That's where a bit of regular "turn it all off" pays dividends. If you're hand flying with the flight director on it's like typing a dictated story thinking you're coming up with all the good ideas.