A very good article about AF 447. I think it provides a fairly detailed account of what happened and why.

an interesting paragraph:

"But by the 1970s, a new reality had come into view. Though the accident rate had been reduced, the accidents that continued to occur were being caused almost entirely by pilots—the very people, many of them still at the controls, who had earned a nearly heroic reputation for having stood in the way of the mechanical or weather-related failures of the past. Pilot error had long been a recognized problem, but after the advent of jets it was as if an onion had been peeled to reveal an unexpectedly imperfect core. The problem was global. In Europe and the United States, a small number of specialists began to focus on the question. They were researchers, regulators, accident investigators, test pilots, and engineers. The timing was unfortunate for line pilots, who had begun to fight a futile rear-guard action, ongoing today, against an inexorable rollback in salaries and status. The rollback was a consequence of the very improvements in technology that had made the airlines safer. Simply put, for airline pilots the glory days were numbered, and however unfortunate that was for them, for passengers it has turned out to be a good thing."

I'm curious who the writer believes is fighting against "an inexorable rollback in salaries and status." It sure ain't ALPA. Must be talking about European pilots.