which was considered to be the cause of crash Eastern 401 into the everglades. IIRC, the crash was caused by 3 geeks in the cockpit paying more attention to a burned out gear indicator bulb than the rest of the dials in the plane. It is believed that a crew member leaned down to fiddle with the panel and in doing so pushed on the yoke with sufficient force as to convince the autopilot that he had assumed control.

So I doubt they were fighting the thing. More likely they simply had no idea what to do and no time to do it. At FL34 you have maybe 10 seconds of useful function before your wetware seizes. It does sound like the decompression sensors/alarm were broken and thus events may have simply overtaken them. if so, the autopilot wouldn't know there was no pressurization and probably would have landed a full load of stiffs but at least the farmers would have been safer.

I have one of those garmin thingies as well but I also know how to work one of [link|http://www.starpath.com/catalog/accessories/1840.htm|these] because, as you note, sometime you might have to do it yourself.

but could never get the hang of it - I found it faster to simply draw the vector triangles and solve them. Might be all those statics/dynamics classes in engineering school.

I've since lost the thing. And you can just draw vectors on the exam as well.