As a postscript to my previous post (pun not intended), I'd like to follow up on something an earlier contributor said about the normal response of a pilot to loss of lift.
As I have already stated, I'm not a pilot, but as I understand it, the way to get maximum lift out of an airliner with conventional wings is to pull the stick back until you feel the stick shaker, and then hold it just forward of that. This is borne out by the graph I included above - although I still think this action depends very much on you having sufficient available power to overcome the increased drag.
Maybe a concorde pilot, or a military pilot who has flown delta wing jets, can confirm what I believe to be a different approach altogether for delta winged aircraft. I suspect there is a point on the low-aspect ratio wing curve where your trade off of lift versus drag with angle of attack is at its most beneficial. This would vary with available power, as it would with a conventional wing, but whatever the case, I am sure it is well below what we might for the sake of argument call the "stall" point.
My point is that for a delta wing, I suspect there is an optimal angle of attack, probably below 20 degrees, which is not heralded by buffet or stick-shaker and beyond which you should not go without masses of available power to pull you out of trouble.
Again - please understand that there is no disrespect intended - but I wonder if Capt. Marty suffered from his extensive experience with conventional wing aircraft and assumed (granted that we already know he apparently disregarded or failed to comprehend the airspeed warnings from his F/O) that as long as he didn't feel the stick shaker, he could keep pulling back for as long as necessary to reach Le Bourget. In hindsight, with 20-20 vision, time to analyse and reflect, etc, etc, maybe the best course of action from an aerodynamic point of view would have been to allow the nose to come down more and accept the sink rate but at least maintain some airspeed (energy).
I concede that the extreme pitch up that concorde experienced may have been due to a number of factors beyond the pilot's control; for example a rapidly changing COG due to loss of fuel forward of the already unusually aft-situated COG or fire damage to the control surfaces. My comments above are based on the supposition that the increasing pitch up of the nose was due to pilot input.
This is not submitted as factual representation of events on that fateful day, or indeed to imply that this was anything but another minor consideration in the train of unfortunate events, but merely as another point to consider among the many others we have been discussing.
Addendum
Since writing this, I have become convinced that Capt. Marty did the very best he could to extract maximum performance out of concorde in rapidly deteriorating conditions.
I am not deleting this post so that the thread will retain its continuity and the later posts make some sense, however I withdraw any speculation that Capt. Marty could have acted in any other way to prolong the controlled flight of the aircraft at that time.
I have also since been corrected about concorde's design in that a stick shaker (or similar) is included and operates well below the theoretical maximum alpha of the aircraft - not to warn of imminent stall, but to give the pilot intuitive feedback that he is pushing the boundaries of the design envelope.
[edited for typo]
[ 01 September 2001: Message edited by: Covenant ]
[edited for clarity]
[ 01 September 2001: Message edited by: Covenant ]
[edited to include retraction and correction]
[ 04 September 2001: Message edited by: Covenant ]