I'm just SLF but have an interest in aviation human/machine interaction so read a lot of reports to try and get insight into why people do certain things - and one thing here terrifies me from the report.
1.4.51 e - "the captain initially considered switching off the ADIRUs to put the craft into direct law"
My understanding of that would have disabled the airbus protections that effectively saved the aircraft - so would have resulted in a full and sustained nose down because of the jammed forward side stick. I don't know at what point aircraft start to break up, but I can't see a happy ending if he did that. Wasn't there a recent event where similar happened, captain pulled out the breakers to "reset a system", ended up in direct law and also impacting with the ocean as a result?
But the thought process behind that fascinates me. Do pilots have such little trust in the automatics that disabling it as a first troubleshooting factor is instinctive? Is this lack of training, lack of competence, all of the above - or is it just that human's don't react as expected in high stress situations - and stuff like this is hard to train to make instinctive.