Sign into an existing account

The pilot in command asked permission to do a very specific test in commercial traffic and was refused. After being refused he turned around to return to Perpignan and did several low risk tests along the way. The accident didn't happen because of a lack of altitude. You can blame almost any aircraft accident on lack of altitude but that's usually secondary to why the aircraft was in trouble to begin with. These pilots had plenty of altitude to recover from their extreme nose up attitude as evidenced by the plane plunging into the ocean nose first. At some point the aircraft stalled and at that time became unrecoverable but even at that altitude was completely recoverable until it stalled. It was shown that that pilot was not trained to recover from that situation because he was trained to rely on the aircraft's automation which ordinarily would never allow the plane to stall but as mentioned, the sensors were frozen and without pilot intervention it was going to crash regardless of altitude. Indeed a higher altitude could be blamed for the crash as that's what allowed the pitch sensors to freeze.