Is there anyone with airline pilot experience who could come with some detailed analysis of this? To me, I would hazard a guess that whomever was controlling the airplane was unaware on short final that the autothrottle had been deactivated. This is consistent with pulling back on the control column to maintain altitude, an action which will give in the desired result when the autothrottle is engaged, but must be accompanied by manually increasing throttle otherwise. This is an elementary piloting mistake, which I believe is impossible to do in the Airbus since the fly-by-wire system will prevent you from placing the aircraft in a stall condition. So this might be consistent with the information that the captain was transitioning from the Airbus to the Boeing. However, I would be surprised if the investigation doesn't provide additional details about the human factors among the flight crew.
I guess the biggest question I'm left with after this is how professional pilots can make this kind of elementary piloting mistake: Not watching the airspeed on final approach, and not reacting immediately when the PAPI indicates that the aircraft is too low. I was left with the same kind of question after the Air France disaster; this plane was stalled straight into the ocean from cruising altitude. It's a big mystery to me how three pilots could overlook this condition for four minutes. Maybe this is just the kind of fluke accident that will happen sometimes when you have ten thousand airliners in the sky every day. But it seems like a good idea to investigate whether pilots rely too much on the computers and forget the basics.
Regardless, let's not draw any conclusions until the investigation has had its say. It's okay to speculate, but I feel that it doesn't provide a lot of benefit to go into detailed scenarios when the complete picture is unknown.
I guess the biggest question I'm left with after this is how professional pilots can make this kind of elementary piloting mistake: Not watching the airspeed on final approach, and not reacting immediately when the PAPI indicates that the aircraft is too low. I was left with the same kind of question after the Air France disaster; this plane was stalled straight into the ocean from cruising altitude. It's a big mystery to me how three pilots could overlook this condition for four minutes. Maybe this is just the kind of fluke accident that will happen sometimes when you have ten thousand airliners in the sky every day. But it seems like a good idea to investigate whether pilots rely too much on the computers and forget the basics.
Regardless, let's not draw any conclusions until the investigation has had its say. It's okay to speculate, but I feel that it doesn't provide a lot of benefit to go into detailed scenarios when the complete picture is unknown.