Wasn’t that the flight that had the bad peto/air speed sensors that went down in the Atlantic and they couldn’t find it for a long time?
Not that the pilots shouldn’t have been able to recover, but I thought it was a foregone conclusion that this was a mechanical failure first.
Yes, it went down in June 2009 and was recovered in April 2011.
They had an airspeed comparator anomoly from icing, and the autopilot disconnected - the computer essentially “gave up” on the right airspeed and handed the plane over to the pilots. The rest was crew error.
I believe 2 of the 3 pitot /static systems had no pitot heat (designed that way). They flew through an area of severe icing associated with a line of thunderstorms, the pitot system allegedly iced up and confused the fly by wire system and the pilots were unable to hand fly the aircraft for whatever reason. The aircraft stalled and crashed from 36,000 feet.