It used to be that the propaganda needed to launch a war (Iraq) would be published by the NYTs of the world, but even that is no longer needed thanks to social media.
Agreed. The sequence of events also supports this.
I believe one of the pilots made a terrible muscle memory mistake and cutoff the fuel instead of raising the landing gear. This would explain why the landing gear was never raised, why the pilot who was accused of cutting off the fuel denied it (in his mind he had only retracted the landing gear) and why the engines were turned back on after presumably realizing the mistake.
Unless you have some compelling evidence to the contrary, this cannot be dismissed as "edge cases" when cultural norms have changed across the board and all it takes is one complaint...
QA for non-AI code is limited at best to begin with, why would AI code be any different?