Re: the discussions on automatic terrain avoidance, I find it incredible that an Airbus which can automatically ensure it is not flown outside of it's flight envelope can still be flown into terrain
No doubt the cockpit was full of blaring sirens, the radar altimeter knew (or thought it knew) what was happening, GPS knew where they were, and yet the aircraft seems to have flown straight into a mountain
Assuming these things can be manually overridden, and accepting nothing is infallible, I've seen no explanation yet as to why it wouldn't be better for the aircraft to halt it's descent and possibly climb if it thinks it's about to fly into terrain with landing gear not down, and perhaps even inititate a transponder code to indicate it has just manually intervened and the pilots may be incapacitated
I would wager most SLF would gladly fly on an airline that implemented such a solution