I’d like to know what the aircrew was doing for the 4+ minutes that the aircraft was in a stall. I’m not familiar with Airbus pilot manuals, but I am familiar with Boeing procedures: 1. Disconnect autopilot. 2. Disconnect auto-throttle. 3. Aggressively apply maximum thrust. 4. Roll wings level and rotate at 3 degree/second to +20 degree pitch. 5. Retract speed brakes. 6. If altitude is still dropping, continue rotation up to the pitch limit indicator (if available) or stick shaker or initial buffet. The pilot not flying checks maximum thrust, speed brakes off, and verifies all required actions have been taken, and calls out any omissions.
In all fairness to this aircrew, maybe they had multiple bad instrument readings that contradicted each other. If this was happening at night with no visible horizon, that radically complicates the problem. The article does seem to imply that the aircrew did not respond to the stall warning. That’s bad, but we don’t know if there were other simultaneous warnings/horns or if multiple instruments were contradicting.
I don’t believe that the average pilot would not be able to recover from something like this with a fully functioning airplane and 1 or 2 erroneous instruments.