Originally Posted by
Capn Bloggs
I doubt it. They ONLY reason they kept puling back was to reach the runway which was in plain view straight ahead.
The AF447 crew had no outside reference to entice them to pull back, they were simply climbing and slowing down, and as they did the jet trimmed back for them. In a normal aeroplane, the nose would have dropped if the pilots had done nothing.
You're comparing the two different reasons for pulling back, and that difference doesn't really matter. The point is that they did, and the likeliness of that being mitigated by auto trimming vs. not. We can see that lack of auto trimming is far from a guarantee against the pilot applying obscene amounts of force manually. I grant that the stick force, though useless in the Asiana case, does give some chance of providing a cue. But how much chance? I dunno. (Overall I'm in favor of the speed stable feedback design, but that's cheap words since I've only ever flown that kind.) Also for AF447 speculating on what the nose would have done "if the pilots had done nothing" is moot, as they didn't do nothing, they pulled all the way back and the result would have been largely the same if it was in a conventional airplane. (Same for the less famous crash of Air Asia 8501, a virtual duplicate of AF447).
I think a likelier benefit to both of those (447, 8501) would have been if the controls were physically interlinked, and the tunnel visioned CA might have been clued in to what the FO was inputting. In both cases, the CA was making some half-hearted forward pushes, so he had the right idea. But there was no meaningful nose-down response due to the FO overpowering him hard against the aft stop. If the CA knew the reason, they could have yelled for the FO to stop and/or push forward, as he pushed harder forward himself.