Even if you loose total situational awareness, it seems difficult (in hindsight, naturally) to escape the feeling that you are basically falling out of the sky by pulling up on the stick. If anything, from an untrained perspective, seems like an instinctual move to try to keep the thing in the air when it is naturally pushing down to gain airspeed.
One of the speculations in the BAE report was that the loss of situational awareness may have included losing track of what mode the aircraft was in. Apparently when it is in Normal mode, an attempt to stall the aircraft would cause the system to take corrective action increasing engine rpm and disallowing the commanded nose up, thus actually recovering from the situation. However, the plane was not in Normal mode. it was in Alt 1 mode in which there is no safety envelope enforcement. They said this was just a speculation since they did not have any specific proof that this is what happened. Hence my original comment.
Anyway, this discussion is probably inappropriate for a discussion of rebooting rail locomotives, the failure of which is nowhere near as potentially disastrous as an aircraft critical flight system, which actually have triple or quadruple redundancy to work around failures. We got into this discussion because people veered off into the eternal A vs B pissing contest and some absurd claims about pilots taking apart computers and shuffling circuit boards. Very romantic indeed!
