Quote from mm43:
The elevators were max NU and held the attitude at +16°.
Quote from The Ancient Geek
I am still trying to figure out how any pilot would not realise that holding full backstick on anything other than an AN-2 (*) is a bad idea and is sure to get you into big trouble.
As mm43 is now likely to be asleep, I'll offer my twopence-worth. The BEA does not say the PF had selected full back-stick, but you must remember that the FBW had only partially degraded to Pitch-Alternate Law – not Direct Law. (If it had degraded to Direct law, stick-to-elevator would have been in operation. But in Pitch-Alternate, that is not the way it works.)
Even a neutral (in pitch) stick would have resulted in full up-elevator, because the FBW would have still been trying to achieve (maintain) 1G, and the THS seems to have reached full nose-up trim (13NU) at around the apogee-point. Normally, Pitch-Alternate has a stall-protection function, based on AoA. But the AoA readings had been ruled invalid earlier because of the (false) low-airspeed data.
Although it was inevitably unsuccessful in maintaining 1G, and the aircraft's trajectory had become semi-ballistic, the system would have tried its best. In so doing, it would have selected full up-elevator. It no longer had recourse to the THS, which had reached full-travel.
Remember, the vertical-G that the system tries to achieve is governed by the position of the sidestick, unless protections come into operation.