Fly the Airplane
Great narrative, but factually wrong on at least two accounts:<p>>If the pilots has switched a button to re-enable autopilot, everyone on board would have lived. But they didn’t. One co-pilot made a single, absurd mistake–for twenty full minutes–that brought the plane down.<p>First factual error: The button they should've switched is not the auto-pilot button (which they operate many times per flight), but the flight mode button (which most pilots never operate in their career).  When the plane lost at least two of the three pitot tube readings, it went from the NORMAL "Law" to the ALT "Law", where the airplane doesn't guard itself against many pilot errors.  When the pitots de-iced shortly thereafter, the plane did NOT go back to NORMAL "Law": it had to be switched there manually.  The pilots did not do that and it seems to be the consensus so far (can't state that for certain before the official report is released) that they did not realize they were flying the plane in ALT and then DIRECT Law.<p>Second factual error: the "absurd mistake" lasted nowhere near 20 minutes.  The first problem appeared at 2:10:03UTC and flying into the ocean occurred at 2:14:28UTC -- 4 minutes 23 seconds in all.