Connected
On 24 July 2014, an MD-83, you know, a plain vanilla old fashioned aircraft with interconnected yokes, stick shakers and moving thrust levers STALLED while cruising at FL310 over Mali, it dipped the left wing and descended at extremely high vertical rate with pilot input consisting mainly of FULL AFT YOKE and FULL RIGHT AILERON (the ideal controls to keep it in the left spin).
On 16 August 2005 an MD-82 stalled during cruise at FL330 over Venezuela. The loss of airspeed was not noticed in time and pilot actions were insufficient to prevent a full stall. No proper recovery actions were taken. The pilot maintained full aft stick all the way down, with stick shaker and aural stall warning active.
B737 at AMS was mentioned many times already.
Egyptair 990 showed the physical reality of 2 people both working their own yoke - their efforts are summed, not electronically like in Airbus, but mechanically: if one pulls with 300 daN, and the other pushes with 300 daN, the result is nil elevator effect, unless the opposing forces overcome the mechanical breakout feature that keeps the yokes connected. The result then is, one elevator up, the other down, pitch effect on aircraft hard to predict, roll effect taking place.
The proper way to take control, is by really taking it (override button in Airbus), (making sure that other guy relases yoke in Boeing) and then applying proper recovery controls.
....
You get it, stop the perpetual discussion about Airbus systems.
About the "startle effect" of complicated malfunctions, bla, bla, ....
Put a 16 year old kid in a glider, and by the time that he goes up for his first solo trip, he has practised 35 MAYDAY FUEL Emergencies (zero fuel in tanks), has done full blown spins, full blown stalls, 2 winch cable breaks at low altitude and a total flight experience of 5 hours 57 minutes.
What needs to be connected is the pilot's brain to FLYING, not to "being a pilot".
Don't reply with "the pilot flying AF447 was a glider pilot". Perhaps he did a bit of flying in a glider during some training segment, but clearly he was also one of the "brain not connected to flying" bunch.
Do "we" handfly passenger jets - yes we do, only the boring high level cruising stuff is autopilot compulsory because of RVSM rules. Unfortunately not every company in the world is so very relaxed with keeping manual flight skills sharp.