Not quite. V1 is the takeoff abort decision speed; beyond V1, you are going too fast to stop safely in the runway length still available to you. If the plane i

Not quite. V1 is the takeoff abort decision speed; beyond V1, you are going too fast to stop safely in the runway length still available to you. If the plane is on fire and you've lost an engine and the computers and screens all die, but you've passed V1, you are still taking off anyway. V2 is the safe single-engine-failure climb-out speed. This is the speed you pitch for after rotating, so that you're not flying too slowly that an engine failure would be dangerous. Vr is almost always at V1 or a little bit higher; by definition, it cannot be before V1 (if you were rotating before V1, you wouldn't have to worry about whether you have enough runway left to not rotate) or after V2 (if you're at your single-engine-failure climb-out speed, you should've already rotated). The V2 speed is entered into the autothrottle before takeoff (but the autothrottle won't maintain that speed; it will maintain a thrust setting instead). The flight director will command you to pitch up to maintain at least that speed at the current thrust, but only if you've correctly entered an altitude for it to take you up to (which did not happen in this case). Essentially, they were relying on the flight director to command them to rotate, instead of rotating when Vr was called out. This is a catastrophic lapse in judgment.