JD-EE;
As a lay person who does understand "systems" concepts this stall warning without the plane changing velocity, moments after the AP and AT cut out and the air speed drops to 60 knots MUST have some screwy roots somewhere in the system. Could the plane have hit a weather phenomenon that could mess up the pitot tubes and simultaneously subject the plane to a high speed down draft strong enough to move the AoA indicator into a stall configuration? If this can happen would there be any way to save the plane? If it speeds up out of the stall and comes out the other side into the matching up draft things could get exciting in a Mach sort of way, couldn't it?
Lonewolf_50's post describes this very well.
If we must continue to reference airspeed when in fact it has nothing to do with the stall warning which is driven solely by AoA, the "screwy roots" are the fact that the engineers designing the system knew that the airspeed information was both unreliable and beyond design expectations (as a realistic flight regime) for use by downstream system users and was designed to not be "input" below 42kts, (AMM).
I think there is something to be pursued in an AoA display discussion but, as someone pointed out, there's another item to scan on a very busy PFD, so how, when, why do the engineers and pilots decide to display the AoA?
A "flight" regime which is below 60kts IS certainly unrealistic, ....isn't it? And the AoA was working all the way down...the parameter is there, in the data. But so was the buffeting and the inability to stop the extreme rate of descent.
If that set of circumstances is somehow "still confusing" and, as per calls for continued stall warnings when the airplane is falling vertically we need more warnings "just to be sure", where are we then, when it comes to
aviating part of "aviate, navigate, communicate"?
You have to think of the designer's problem. You can imagine all kinds of screwy roots that engineers can conjure that pilots may tap but what do you design for? You make intelligent assessments of not only what is probable but what is possible within the realm practicality.
Do you as an engineer design for 10 ^-9 probability? Why all of a sudden is it an expectation here? Where is the engineering case for this specific case?
At some point the engineer assumes that others in the system know what they're doing, aren't ham-fisted and that they aren't handing a squirrelly system over to amateurs and gamers but handing a robust system which has been vetted by extremely capable engineering people over a long period of time.
That was the point of my longish post about the C* Law...these people actually do know what they're doing and even the harshest critics came to say so after actually taking a look at the A320 design more than twenty years ago.
Does a pilot really need a stall warning at <60kts/AoA > 35deg to tell him or her that the aircraft is stalled?!
We cannot have it both ways. The complaint has been "too many laws", too confusing an airplane! and whatnot, but wait... We need another law to ensure that the stall warning stays in play until...? When...a minus airspeed to cater to the foolish scenario that someone here posited ten-thousand posts ago that the airplane somehow "back-flipped" and that's the reason the spoilers were damaged the way they were?
At some point just a little credit must be offered the engineers who conceived of the designs, put these airplanes on the drawing boards and built them, if only to get some here off top-dead-center in their thinking to consider positing something approximating a marginally-possible scenario regarding this loss-of-control. Focussing narrowly on 'no stall warning below 60kts' is simple, ignorant folly which caters to an unbelievably low standard of professionalism in airline crews.
Your smart-assed remark about "don't just do something, sit there" was and remains spot on. DO NOTHING
was the correct response and that is the action which would have "prevented" the loss of control. I pointed that out three threads ago because that is the way the checklist reads - the airplane was stable before the event and, doing nothing while the airspeeds return will keep the airplane stable. Move it, and you've moved the one "known" in the equation that you had and you've taken yourself into no-man's land with no way back, without a great piece of luck and skill.
In thirty-six other similar events no one did anything and it worked as intended, but no one here is ready to examine the record and talk about it and instead prefer to bash the airplane in ways that have nothing to do with the accident.
Why did the airplane climb? I have already posited a perfectly good reason and no one has examined or critiqued it probably because they can't but they can focus on "the automatics". I don't claim it as correct, just a possibility. I discussed hundreds of posts ago the possible inappropriate execution of the UAS memory items, which require an increase in pitch attitude. Silence about that, but not about the minutae of flight control laws and off-the-wall theories about AIRPROX events and stuck vanes. I won't even bother waking Mr. Occam.
Someone observed that "the thrust didn't increase so how could the airplane climb thus?" One must appreciate the energy/inertia resident in a 205T mass moving at 900 feet per second to understand that one could have pulled the thrust levers to IDLE and raised the nose just 5 degrees and still spectacularly achieved what was always going to be a momentary climb and a pathway to a stall if one didn't get one's act together in a real hurry, or, as you succinctly pointed out, a rapid reduction in their 1/2 m v^2.
Wait!....someone, jcjeant perhaps?, mentioned coverup...yes, yes!...there it is, in front of us all along and we missed the obvious.