A million different things would have helped in this particular situation. A stall warning that doesn't suddenly cut out when the plane exceeds a particular ang

A million different things would have helped in this particular situation. A stall warning that doesn't suddenly cut out when the plane exceeds a particular angle of attack [1] (That's an automation failure!). Emergency pilot tubes (That prevents the plane from dropping out of normal law!). Better pilot tubes (That prevents the plane from dropping out of normal law!) A pilot that actually received proper training (That's a human failure!). Not averaging control inputs between the pilot and the copilot (That's a design failure!). I don't think the takeaway from this is 'In an emergency situation, where the plane knows that it can't make good decisions, it should lock the pilots out and try to fly itself.' By definition, if the plane knew how to fly itself, it wouldn't be an emergency situation! ---- [1] If the plane is so confused that it can't even detect that its in a stall[2], I can't trust it to fly itself. [2] The stall alarm would turn off when the plane was stalling, and would turn on when it was recovering from a stall!