conventional aircraft
DC-ATE
"My only 'complaint', if you will, from the beginning of THIS particular accident was.....that had it been a 'conventional' aircraft, there would not have been a need to check this system."
I am also from the "classic" era. I was able to participate in the twilight of the round engine days in the DC6 and finished my career in the B747-200F.
During my flying career I conducted a number of test flights of aircraft coming out of maintenance C and D checks. The aircraft were DC9-30, DC8-62, and DC8-73. In each case we were required to conduct inflight checks of the stall warning systems (stick shaker). We would pre-compute the appropriate stall speed and stick shaker speed for each configuration. We would initiate the stall recovery either at the shaker or the computed shaker speed which ever came first. It appears to me that the crew in this accident was conducting the equivalent system check in the A320.
One note I will make here is that the procedure for this test required that we would stop nose up stabilizer trim at 20 kts above the computed Vs. This then allowed the recovery without the requirement to override an inordinate pitch up. It appears in this incident the A320 autotrim presented the crew with a situation they were not expecting or not aware of.