With this particular new airplane, with fly-by-wire systems and computers automating a lot of the conditions (and perhaps, if I am to assume correctly, over-riding perhaps pilots in certain situations?) then could this be a case of AI or "smart algorithms" gone wrong? Or are pilots pretty much in control. I know it is too early to assume anything, we still don't know.
737 is not a fly-by-wire, it has classic flight controls (hydraulics for the most part).
There is also no "AI" or "smart algorithms" overriding the pilots, not even on the Airbuses. The electronics is designed in a way that whenever something seems out of whack, the automation will warn the crew and disconnect, handing the entire mess to the human sitting there to sort out.
What some planes (Airbus, not the crashed 737) have are things like the "alpha floor" protections (it prevents stalling under certain conditions) but these are typically the first ones lost/disabled when the computers detect some kind of anomaly - that's what Airbus refers to as "laws" (normal vs alternate when something is wrong for ex).
And when the pilot feels the automation is doing something it shouldn't for whatever reason, there is a disconnect button on the yoke/sidestick and for the worst case there is always a circuit breaker that can be pulled. Even on the Airbus you can fly the plane without the computers - it is going to be difficult but it is still possible.
Looking at Air France flight 447:
"The loss of airspeed indications caused the autopilot, flight director, and autothrust to disconnect, as they require airspeed information to operate. The airplane’s handling characteristics also changed, as the airplane’s fly-by-wire flight controls degraded from its Normal to Alternate law. This led to the loss of many automatic protection mechanisms built into Normal law, including stall protection."
https://risk-engineering.org/concept/AF447-Rio-Paris
Guys, AF447 is not a comparable situation. AF447 was first and foremost caused by relatively inexperienced crew mishandling the controls in a major way - newer attempting the "pitch and power" stable configuration and causing the plane to stall by keeping pulling at the side stick almost all the way down. The crew has never recognized the stall and never attempted to correct it, despite the warnings and buffet they were feeling. It was also not clear who (if anyone) was actually flying - both crewmen were trying to make control inputs at the same time.
The plane was perfectly flyable the entire time, though. At the time of crash it was flown by two rather inexperienced first officers (captain went to sleep after the departure from Rio, I believe, as it was supposed to be a rather uneventful part of the trip). The failure has also occurred at night, at high altitude and in turbulence. None of that was the case for the Lion Air flight (experienced crew, daytime, low altitude, good weather).
Also, since then a lot of training since the AF447 has been focused on both manual flying and recovery from similar failures (the AF447 pilots except of the captain apparently didn't have any training of dealing with unreliable airspeed in a "manual" plane, both having been trained directly on the Airbus).
Here is the AF447 report:
https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/f-cp090601.en.pdfGiven the (few) data we have about the Lion Air flight, it would surprise me if there was any similarity at all to the AF447 flight. The Lion Air crew was obviously not in a stall, they were trying to maintain level flight but ultimately failed.
This entire pitot discussion is very likely a red herring caused by the maintenance log from the day before and there had to be some other major mechanical problem on board (uncontained engine failure, explosion, decompression, whatever) to cause a crash like this. This kind of speculation is pretty pointless until there is more data available, e.g. from the black boxes.