I'm sorry, I'm losing the overview.
Can somebody please remind me, what the margins were in the given conditions?
Obviously, the air was relatively warm yet below dew point. How can we interpret that they couldn't climb higher because of the temperature gradient being shallower than expected? Was that just referring to the tops of the cb being above their ceiling at that time?
What's the speed margin between Vmmo and Vs?
What's the AoA in normal flight at that altitude and what's the Stall AoA? (did I see it's only 6°?)
What triggered the 13° nose up trim on the THS? What impact would that setting have, along with fuel trim aft, on their chances of recovering from a stall if they had positively identified it in the first place?
With so many indicators being unreliable or not available, what "direct", that is aerodynamic or "seat of the pants" feedback would you have in a machine of that size with FBW controls? Obviously, there's no feedback from the control surfaces, there's no stick force to overcome (or rather to soften when the control surfaces get into turbulent air from the stalled wings)
Can the turbulent flow be felt through the airframe?
I honestly have no idea if those guys would have had any primary means of identifying the stall, given that the secondary means (read: instruments) were unreliable.
Also, I've read a lot about "law changes" in this thread, how does an AB pilot stay aware of what law what control axis is in at any given point? I'm sure there's nice flow charts in the documentation, but I wonder how many distinct states of flight law degradations there are and how often the system is allowed to change between them.
If, and it might, this turns out to be a case of "loss of situational awareness" (or rather: they never gained awareness of the situation they were in), it begs the question how complex the situation was when it was presented to them. A simple AoA indicator might have made all the difference to them.
The interface between the automation systems and the pilots seem to be the most difficult part of any design these days. How does the system present all the relevant information while not overwhelm the pilots? And this in a situation where the system is forced to give up since it's parameters are outside what it knows to handle. We could interpret such situations as the design engineers saying "this is a situation we have not considered / thought possible, over to you, pilots". This almost necessarily also means that it's hard or even impossible to say what information is relevant and what can be withheld. As a system designer, you are faced with the decision to possibly withhold information that might be meaningful to interpret the situation or to present information overload which doesn't help either.
I don't envy you guys who poke around at the levels >300.
ps: the system "knows" the AoA. If getting AoA display is an optional item on the aircraft order and AoA is not automatically displayed when the stall warning goes off because the feature wasn't ordered, that would seem sickening to me.