Originally Posted by
flensr
Known pitch and power, very useful to know cold. At the very least if you're initially completely out of ideas, park the throttles 2/3 up, get the slats out for a little extra AOA margin, and put the waterline about 5 deg nose high to give you some time to sort out what's good and what's lying to you.
Absolutely.
Obviously we don't know what happened yet, but it does seem that a lot of pilots from these parts of the world have so little background in flying, the fundamentals escape them. .... like the relief pilot of Air France. He had virtually zero experience flying anything other than a big, automated jet.
Know your rough pitch and power settings.