Personally I think the only things that mattered in that accident were poor training and poor UI.
First, one of the pilots held the stick back all the way down to the water even though the airplane was clearly stalled. This is completely inexcusable. The automotive equivalent would be holding the accelerator pedal to the floor while aiming at a brick wall. Even worse, the guy who did this was a qualified glider pilot, and glider pilots should have extreme familiarity with stalls and stall recovery since so much of a glider's flight time is spent close to stall.
Second, the control system of the plane handled conflicting inputs from the two pilots by averaging them together. There was no indication to the pilots that they were fighting each other. Positive exchange of control of the aircraft is another really basic thing about flying, even more basic than putting the nose down in a stall. This setup made it far too easy for the pilots to be unaware of who was really flying the plane. If the control sticks moved together, it would have been obvious to the other pilot what was going on.
One could put some blame on the autopilot in causing the one pilot to forget the basics of stall recovery, but it seems to me that the real fault was in not training for it sufficiently, since that's not something you do in normal flight in an airliner anyway.
First, one of the pilots held the stick back all the way down to the water even though the airplane was clearly stalled. This is completely inexcusable. The automotive equivalent would be holding the accelerator pedal to the floor while aiming at a brick wall. Even worse, the guy who did this was a qualified glider pilot, and glider pilots should have extreme familiarity with stalls and stall recovery since so much of a glider's flight time is spent close to stall.
Second, the control system of the plane handled conflicting inputs from the two pilots by averaging them together. There was no indication to the pilots that they were fighting each other. Positive exchange of control of the aircraft is another really basic thing about flying, even more basic than putting the nose down in a stall. This setup made it far too easy for the pilots to be unaware of who was really flying the plane. If the control sticks moved together, it would have been obvious to the other pilot what was going on.
One could put some blame on the autopilot in causing the one pilot to forget the basics of stall recovery, but it seems to me that the real fault was in not training for it sufficiently, since that's not something you do in normal flight in an airliner anyway.