Air France Flight

So now we know. As expected, the pitot tubes must have iced up--but then the copilot did something even I know not to do. It isn't the most important rule in flight--I think "Land wheel side down" is tops on the list--but "if you stall, nose down" is something I thought was drummed into pilots from the start. But he nosed up. And apparently the other copilot did the same (or at least he didn't get it right either), and the pilot didn't have time to take control.

Of course if I were in the cockpit I'd have had to spend a dozen minutes figuring out what did what and have been below the waves long before I figured out how to get the thing into manual mode.

At this point I start wondering about the user interface. I have to assume the pilots were competent, and tolerably familiar with the controls. If so, then what they thought they were doing didn't match what was actually happening. Either the instruments lied to them, or their operation was misleading. If you are trained to use a computer interface that hides the details of the flight model from you--where you can say "Go there" and it goes--that interface hides the breakdown of the model from you. Did they have an interface that would tell the computer to tell the plane to "climb" by pointing up?

Or, pilot's union protests to the contrary, they might have been stoned to the gills. Flights are supposed to be boring...