It’s easy to get disoriented and accidentally accelerate into the ground, yes, (which is basically the procedure in a stall to get lift back anyway) but based on the ATC recording they knew what was going on and just dropped out of the sky.

The pilots were trying to save the plane up until the last moments. They declared an overspeed condition soon after they ran into trouble, so they were aware of it, but did not intentionally cause it.

And if they were so iced over that control surfaces weren't responding and the wings were no longer generating lift, at that point they were well past the "Anything we do is going to have any effect whatsoever on the future" point.

I don't intend to listen to the audio. Second-hand, it sounds as though they did absolutely everything they could after hitting the cell, and the only way to have avoided this whole situation was "Don't fly that route that day."

... a problem that, in general, we see more often in private-jet and single-engine aviation than commercial-carrier aviation. Far more incentives to make a really, really bad call... And when the bad call happens, the Venn diagram of victims and responsible parties tends to have a lot more overlap, so there's, practically speaking, fewer consequences to discourage such bad decisionmaking in the future (can't meaningfully punish the dead, and the dead can't learn from experience what a bad call "smells" like on the lead-up to it).

I don't agree they had no way to avoid this. Every accident is a chain of mistakes, gaps or mechanical issues. We don't know the whole story here, but I do know that planes of this class are not given up for dead when they hit a surprise weather system. If they are, that means they missed something earlier - weather radar was misinterpreted or a bad judgment call was made.

[delayed]

Right - I misread your message. Yes they needed to avoid that storm and should have had chances to do so.

Anything is is possible, but Mach tuck may have been an issue [1], but it slo may have been actual flight controls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_tuck

The italicised paragraph at the start of that article is not what I was expecting to read...

The Mach tuck recovery is counter intuitive, and could lead to further overspeed and forces exceeding design tolerances.

Another possibility is flutter. I read overspeed and icing mentioned by a pilot in the transcript. Therefore I think of those two elements conspiring in an edge case resulting in forces exceeding design limits, something broke, and made recovery impossible.

But anyway, the investigation will likely answer these questions.

agree. some other forums have alluded them losing their horizontal stabilizer (based off it not being in some stills of the plane crashing) - so the something broke case may also be a big element.