Ethiopian airliner slams into mountain after pilot reports problems and requests return to airport.
The cause? Very high chance it is due to the automation attached to a faulty air speed indicator, called a Pitot tube. Both Boeing and Airbus have had many major accidents found by the NTSB to be due to this.
The problem is the design of the automation that takes over flying the plane from the pilot to attempt to prevent a stall. It is nearly completely reliant on the one airspeed sensor. When it gets clogged by bugs or debris, the airspeed reads low, so the automation automatically puts the plane into a dive to recover airspeed.
Pilots can partially compensate for this if they know this is the problem, but of course, how could they know? Instruments giving false readings and automation is fighting them.
Sorry, no sauce on this. Too tired now. It's easy to find, though.