CONF iture,
maybe i have been unclear of what i see as flying as level as possible
- my fault since flying level flight was simply not possible without power!
i used the term 'flying level' as a short version of saying: to stay as close to level flight as possible with the existing plane configuration and airspeed, in order to achieve best horizontal progress with lowest loss of flight height.
It would mean most efficient use of whatever energy was available to get closest to the airport without stalling or loosing too much height.
The AP is surely not designed for such flying
but looking at the data from Interim Report it was pretty close to optimum.
We are talking about possible optimization for the dirty configuration plane flying close-to-stall at some 300ft. Hardly possible to solve analytically. Not so easy to replicate in sim. The crew has successfully solved it empirically. What we are doing is analyzing what they did in order to identify possibilities for any realistic improvement.