I'll play devil's advocate and suggest that it is a systems error that the 777 accepted an altitude of 0 without sounding an alarm or at least requiring prior confirmation. It shouldn't be that easy to almost total the airplane.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/56894/why-is-0-...
Besides: you can't fix stupid, if someone switches on the autopilot seconds after wheels up without checking what altitude it is set for it could be anything, including below ground level. Autopilots aren't magic, and pilots have a very large amount of discretion in how they fly the airplane, but these pilots weren't really prepared to fly the plane for one second more than they had to.
There is a reason they got sacked. Oh, and as to this being a Boeing issue: this setting can be entered on any autopilot. I'm all for giving Boeing shit when they are the ones that messed up but here they didn't.
> It shouldn't be that easy to almost total the airplane.
It’s not, the pilots are complete fucking morons who ignored multiple checklists and basic knowledge about flying (210 knots on the ground is insane).
This wasn’t autopilot or anything like that. It’s just hints for an already manual operation.
The airplane should already have a terrain database in the ground proximity warning system, so triggering a warning in this case doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, should have very low false positives, and could improve flight safety.
Should it be necessary? Theoretically not, but pilots are human, and we have to choose whether we want to be smug about their stupidity while piecing together 300+ charred corpses, or account for humans doing human things.
There is the radio-altimeter which uses ground based radar but that is for spoken-aloud altitude readouts and terrain warnings and as far as I’m aware doesn’t factor in Boeing or airbus autopilot.
At least in the U.K., the lingo has us refer to this always as height (ie, above the ground) and not altitude (within the air above a hypothetical sea level)