@Copterline 103: I am a training Captain on the S76. Our clients are primarily offshore S76 operators who send their pilots to us to do initial and recurrent training on C++. I also do recurrent training for VVIP corporate clients as well. So I have a reasonable understanding of the aircraft and the common mistakes pilots make.
The VVIP pilots are usually at a good standard, both in technical knowledge and flight manoeuvre technique. The offshore guys much less so, particularly technical knowledge and CRM, although their hand flying is generally OK. Utter confusion usually reigns when we get to some particular malfunctions, including AFCS, use of the autopilot and flight director modes, and avionics/electrical malfunctions.
Time and time again I've seen pilots get themselves so utterly confused with a relatively minor malfunction that the safety of the aircraft is put in jeopardy. I see pilots attempt the same solution to a problem 5 or 6 times over before I tell them to think of something else. If a solution doesn't work first time (e.g. reset an AP), why would trying the same thing 5 or 6 times over yield a different result? This is what I'm seeing in the Bristow FDR data, AP2 reset attempted 7 times during the course of the flight. This is telling me they were short on other ideas. I see it all the time.
The flight control malfunctions are generally handled much better. With "whether to land immediately" decision making in response to a malfunction, a bad decision to keep flying is probably made 99 times to every un-neccessary decision to land/ditch immediately. So in this instance, if in hindsight the crew made a wrong decision to ditch, that would be out of character. Because, as I say, if there is a bad decision, it's usually to keep flying when they shouldn't.
With this experience in mind, and piecing together the little we know about what happened, I strongly suspect something electrical happened that suckered the crew into thinking they had a flight control malfunction that necessitated ditching. There is no electrical malfunction in the 76 that requires "land immediately", except for an electrical fire that can't be extinguished. I would be very surprised if the problem was hydraulic or flight control binding/jam/interference, but I shall keep an open mind until they work it out.