if this crew had resisted the urge to act, and just sat and watched, they may well all be alive today
From reading all of this and associated threads, it seems that there have been 3 incidents
reported on these threads of Airbus aircraft apparently undemanded 'zoom climbing'.
- The incident on approach to Paris may be different but resulted in the aircraft doing a wingover and recovering.
- The incident where an A340 climbed past an A330 in a zoom climb during the day VMC and recovered.
- AF447 appears to have zoom climbed to above the aerodynamic ceiling of the airframe. I am not sure that the system is designed to cope with suddenly being in the stall without any approach to it.
So it appears that something in the Airbus or handling can zoom climb the aircraft (has this happened with other types?)
I have only 'fallen out' above the aircraft ceiling in single jets where the aircraft were built for unusual positions and engine thrust had no pitch effect. If as everyone says the TOGA power would pitch the aircraft nose up, once that had been done and the aircraft started dropping stabilized but with an AOA that was on the wrong side of the drag curve, is it certain that there is sufficient aerodynamic authority in the controls to do a simple ND to recover?
Would the crew have to be more imaginative with large rudder deflection or even perhaps asymmetric thrust to put one wing down - and if they did that could they end up changing a stabilized stall into a spin?
It just seems to me that perhaps there was only one chance to recover from what happened and that was at the top of the zoom holding full nose down and reducing power which should have bunted the aircraft back into a flyable state. But the 'standard' stall recovery of NU to 5deg and TOGA was precisely the opposite.