It disengages when you fight it. With the associated and very recognizable autopilot disengage sound. I'm sure there is more to this story than "crew mistake" as some seem to imply here.

I'm absolutely not knowledgeable on this topic so double check everything I say.

I think the issue on the 737 Max was that there's been a known and studied system (called the MCAS IIRC) on Boeing planes that overrides pilot controls under some specific pre-determined circumstances and that system had been buffed to compensate for design flaws that were discovered too late to be corrected. On top of being faulty, that buffed system was also way outside of its initial intent and purpose (or rather the parameters guiding its operation were changed so much that it should have been addressed as a separate system and mandated specific training while they were trying to portray the plane as a simple evolution requiring no pilot re-training from earlier versions of the 737).

So, to me, it looks like yet another issue with a system overriding pilot controls for whatever reason.

More generally, this falls into that weird pattern of relying on external sensors which starts a chain of bad decisions leading to accidents (this was also a sensor issue with the Air France 447, although the chain was largely human this time, the pilots realizing way too late their repeated mistake).

French military radio procedures also have specific pronunciations to disambiguate words. The fact that it is not used (assuming it is not) in ATC radio is not a feature of the French language.

Are you a native french speaker? I'm fluent in a couple languages and all but my native one are insanely hard to understand over radio. Even with the special pronunciations there are a lot of nearly indistinguishable sounds in english, and I'm not sure those sounds are even apparent to a non-native speaker who isn't specifically trained in them. It's very possible they are using an equivalent but we can't hear it without some practice.

The official way of saying numbers in French is to spell each digit separately and 1 is "unité". So 011 is zéro, unité, unité.

However if it is clear enough and there is no ambiguity, the common way of saying numbers can be used, so zéro onze is acceptable. In normal conditions, no french speaker will mistake "onze" for "un", the latter should be "unité" anyways.

The main problem with "un" is that it sounds like "hein?", which means something like "huh?", the kind of meaningless words that punctuate conversations without even noticing.

Especially when it comes to numbers!

The other day I asked for direction at a front desk and the lady told me to go to the office # "trente quatre vingt", I wasn't sure whether that was "3420" or "3080".