Originally Posted by Machinbird
Posters from Europe seem to believe that you will never touch the manual trim wheel while airborne. And if you do use the trim wheel during a training session, you will not pass.
They are freakingly correct! Under no circumstances is the trimwheel to be used while the autotrim is operative. It's not a dogma, manual trim in normal and altn law is useless as autotrim will return it to what it thinks is correct setting and 99.9999% of the time, it is right too.
What the poster from HK was referring to is loss of autotrim in alternate abnormal and direct laws or in mechanical backup. Then you have to use manual trim. As A320 was my first jet aeroplane ("You reek of propellers" was one of milder estimates of my capabilities I received from established jet jockeys), powers that be decided I should be given 20 hrs of sim time in direct law to get used to oh-so-enormous-speed-of-320. To my utter disappointment, 320 turned to be much easier and more comfortable to fly than ATR-42 even in direct law with all protections off and no autotrim.
I've never, ever heard of sidestick going haywire in real life, except for DLH's roll polarity mess up - courtesy of maintenance.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, flights through ITCZ every day. Somehow, they manage to get to their destinations safely. Go figure.
CONFiture has made an excellent question: why does autotrim doesn't stop when stall warning is activated? I hope that final report will have equally good answer to that.
As for the rest of speculation around, it seems that my neural centre for disgust over completely unfounded conjecture has overloaded and popped the breaker.