By now the PF was "conditioned". He was rewarded for NU and punished for ND.
The frigging plane turned the stall warning OFF when it had no good reason to do so. So what's this nonsense BEA has been spouting that the plane is not at fault? The plane has a critical design flaw in its software that conditions pilots to do the wrong thing even when they know better.
If we were discussing training my dog to roll-over, then perhaps I'd agree, but we're not. All the occupants of the cockpit that night had hundreds of hours of experience and many 10's, if not hundreds of sim hours, so trying this to simplify this to a game of action and reward really seems crass.
UAS is
known to be a situation where alarms, alerts and warnings can be misleading - training dictates fly pitch and power until speed indications recover. Which in flight, unless I'm seriously off-target, they have proven to always do (excepting situations were pitots have been blocked due to human error or bees - never did like bees).
I'm sure that the BEA and Airbus will be looking at the stall warning behavior very closely, but let's not loose sight of a couple of key issues that are VERY UNLIKELY to be the aircraft's fault:
1) Flying THROUGH the CB area was the initiating and fundamental cause. All other flights on the same airway track deviated. Had they done the same we would not be here.
2) The reaction to the stall warning was NOT the initiating problem. The problem was how they arrived at the stall condition in the first place, i.e. pitch and power at the loss of airspeed indication would not lead to this.
Therefore I would suggest that the real work needs to be focused on why they
elected to NOT deviate. Everything else falls out in turn.
I think it fair to say that 99.9% of pilots would claim to have NEVER flown through a CB - because it is known to be a very, very bad thing to try. There are a few stories around from those few that made that mistake and sadly the majority end badly.
The fact that the pitots iced in this situation was a prior issue, one that Airbus had already issued a warning, that for whatever reason AF was slow to action. Whether the appropriate regulatory authorities should set in when there is a potential safety of flight concern, is another topic worth discussion.