This piece by James Fallows is better than the OP and touches on your comment wondering why low airspeed was not noticed: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/a

This piece by James Fallows is better than the OP and touches on your comment wondering why low airspeed was not noticed: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/professional-pilots-on-the-san-francisco-crash/277563/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/professi... One supposition is that the normal system for correcting low airspeed was temporarily disabled. Key lines from the article I linked: "The 777 can catch you out with with what is known as the FLCH trap. When you are above the glide slope and need to get down in a hurry Flight Level Change (FLCH) is a useful mode to use." [...] "The 777 has autothrottle wake up, i.e. when the aircraft approaches a stall the power comes on automatically to almost full power. This gives pilots great confidence; however, autothrottle wake up is inhibited in FLCH. " Of course, time will tell, and we're all out of our depth in trying to understand what happened.