Non-pilot here, asking a layman's question.
This was a flight being carried out following maintenance work, where the expectation had to be that there might be covered sensors and other glitches. Wasn't that the point of the flight - to test all the functions of the a/c that might be affected by such oversights?
The fact that there was a problem with the AoA sensors was presumably exactly the kind of thing they were trying to flush out?
So my question is; had they been performing this test at the 'correct' altitude, would they have been able to recover the situation, in your opinion?
I'm getting confused as to whether this was a 'normal' test flight situation, from which the plane would have been expected to recover given enough height, or whether it's a basic problem with Airbus design.