Protections
I am glad that we got a good input from PJ on the high speed phenomena.
I would take my chances any day about going too fast versus stalling in a large plane. I am not sure if the 'bus has the "nose down" problem that one plane I flew had. If you got too fast ( beyond critical mach), that sucker was hard to get nose up until you could slow down ( speed brakes/spoilers/reduced throttle). Go read about the P-38 in that regard.
I did fly a subsonic design that handled the mach very well, with no pronounced buffet or pitch problems - the A-7D. Nevertheless, at or near the mach the thing was very hard to get any "up" vector without slowing down. I saw about 50 knots over the placard limit one day, and my first clue was I couldn't get a lotta nose up movement pulling off the dive. Glanced at the IAS gauge and I was about 700 knots IAS with a placard limit of 650 IAS or so. Had plenty of altitude and the thing slowed down, pitch control came back and no big deal. It was my first mission over Hanoi in Dec 1972 and I had left the throttle at max while rolling in ( cut me some slack for being a bit hyper at that moment). Didn't make that mistake again, heh heh.
The same applied to the F-86, which also has a subsonic wing ( camber and such a lot different than the "diamond" camber configuration for supersonic jets). As with the SLUF, it could pass the mach and not suffer much due to the all-moving stabilizers/elevators.
As the Airbus safety pub states, AoA is paramount, and worry about pitch, altitude and speed later. GET OUTTA THE STALL, you dumb a$$, then worry about speed later. And this applies even on short final. Better to hit with more horizontal than vertical vector - a "skip hit". The first Airbus crash shows this.
One thing some folks here must realize is that the planes fly in a different coordinate system than one related to the ground. It's the airmass, which is not usually static with respect to the ground. It's called wind, duh? Some are quibbling about the actual velocities at impact. I submit that at 10 feet above the water, that indicated and true airspeed were within a hundreth of a knot. Same for inertial velocities. The really good thing about the HUD I flew with from 1971 to 1984 was it showed me the actual flight path vector with respect to the ground, and not the airmass. I'll try to get my LEF failure landing digitized and you can see its value.