of course it was the pilot doing unbelievable errors in understanding the situation and steering the plane ignoring all procedures and hand flying basics. But he was not acting as stupid as it sometimes is stated in an enormously simplified version of the event.
I sometimes wonder if the chaps at the front during these kinds of accidents weren't thinking " Holy moly this is a can of worms.....I know how to fly, I know what to do if I'm nose down or stalling......but what the hell is happening? ....I don't know what the truth is here, it's impossible to tell".
By that I mean that it's easy to sit here and feel like you would have behaved differently, and I would like to think that I would be able to fly a pitch and a power until I made sense of things....but would I? Would you? With the g force and the conflicting information I wonder if a mental overload situation is almost inevitable with certain types of failures in the bus.
All I know is that I'm grateful that I'm old enough to have done a fair whack of hand flying transport aircraft and that I'm on a 737 that is pretty basic. If not for those two things I don't know I would be any more able to keep my passengers safe than the folk on AF 447 or Air Asia 8501. It sure is interesting times.