That was the flight plan; not the assigned altitude from ATC, as far as we know at this point. There is a big difference, which pilots and ATCs do understand, but the press has not made clear in this case. The pilots needed to receive the FL360 altitude clearance from ATC. Be wary of what you read in the papers. I'm sorry you'd rather resort to digs than try to understand more about this.

I've read a lot of the stories, including those from Brazil. No where have I seen that there is a recording of controllers assigning them FL360. Can you present a link to that? If that were true, and the pilots responded affirmatively but didn't change altitude, that would seem to prove pilot error. Electronics do strange things - especially new ones - a crash may have jolted it into working again. We simply don't know.

Good to see you're not judging.

The controllers were not heard yet? Then what about the seven calls? And the altitude change you seem certain they gave to the Legacy?

Janda, think about this ... if there was a plane out there you couldn't communicate with and you knew his last altitude was FL370 and you know there's another plane you are talking to flying head-on at that altitude, wouldn't you contact the plane you could get a hold of and play it safe and have him out of the way? This is the big question here. There are enough redundancies built into the system that with all the equipment failures, it still should not have happened. So why did it?