Quoting excitation:-
The report does not explicitly say how long the nose-up input was. IMHO it was continuous from 2h 10 min 05 "...nose up input." until 2 h 10 min 16 "...nose-down control inputs". At most this was for 11 seconds and resulted in the climb from FL350 to FL375 which sounds reasonable.
None of the mentions of 'inputs' record the length of
any of the inputs, excitation? However, the context - particularly the fact that the BEA note does not go on to record any climb, but instead quotes the PNF talking about the speeds - strongly suggests that the PF achieved his object (corrected the roll and duly levelled out). I've only flown light stuff (mainly gliders, as it happens
) but even I know that a roll tends to produce less lift from the wings, so that a touch of 'up elevator' is often required to maintain altitude when recovering from an uncommanded roll?
And further, had the PF kept the 'noseup' on, I can't imagine ANY aeroplane taking 11 seconds to respond? Or, if any do, I wouldn't want to fly on them?
"Unfortunately the IAS on the right PFD used by PF was not recorded on the FDR."
I believe that normal practice is for the senior first officer (and therefore PIC while the captain is on his break) to remain in his accustomed righthand seat. This is supported by the BEA quoting the captain as saying,
"He's taking my place"?
"Did the ADIRUs give bogus attitude indications?"
Now that's a heck of a good question! And it caused me to look back at a summary of all those 24 ACARS messages. And yes, all three ADIRUs appear to have reported problems simultaneously:-
"34123406IR21,EFCS1X,IR1,IR3"
Looking further, I found something I'd missed earlier - even ISIS, the standby instrument system, appears to have reported problems too:-
34220006ISIS 1,,,,,,,ISIS(22FN
There's an analysis of all the messages below. I can't vouch for its accuracy, but if it IS accurate, and the pilots were presented with a mass of instruments that were either blanked out or reading wrong, the BEA (which only listed the ACARS messages in its first report, without any explanations, and didn't mention them at ALL in the note) is going to have a helluva lot of explaining to do one of these days........
http://www.iag-inc.com/premium/acars2.pdf