Originally Posted by EGPFlyer
From my FCOM
"With the sidestick at neutral, wings level, the system maintains 1 g in pitch"
I've never heard of 'pitch hold'
My apologies, I've oversimplified it into "untrue" category. I've only described what it looked like to me when I'was flying the beast. It isn't pitch hold, rather it's flight path hold yet with no speed excursions or no vertical windshear, it will result in maintaining constant pitch.
I've flown 320/19 with MSNs in low 1000s and never spotted the tendency to pitch up while handflying high. As DozyWannabe mentioned: this quirk was ironed out of TA FBW Airbuses. Difference between gravity on the Earth's surface and at FL390 is about 0.4%, between the equator and poles is 0.5%, I don't think that having constant 1G value of 9.81 ms^-1 in your FBW was good idea, if it ever was used. Could be miscalibration of vertical accelerometer and that there are some Airbi that pitch down slowly, instead of up. We'll have to turn Mythbusters' attention to the issue.
Originally Posted by predictorM9
I may be wrong, but if the static pressure system was totally unaffected, why does the vertical speed graph (page 109 of the report, second graph from top) looks so weird, with huge jumps??
Because aeroplane is so out of flight envelope that AoA, VS, speed, mach, flightpath angle constantly switch themselves off and on. Could be flight/ground logic that gets them but my french is not that good to understand the whole report. However, baro altitude is constantly recorded from top of descent to end. No spikes or surprises there.
Originally Posted by pedrobaltic
was the real aircraft airspeed < 60kts or was this an erroneous reading due to icing?
It was real. Pitot 1 unblocks at 2:10:35, pitot 3 at 2:11:08. After that they agree until AoA goes above 30° and everything becomes mess.
Originally Posted by pedrobaltic
It is a pity if it is the case that when airspeed is unreliable, or all 3 ADC disagree or are out of range, the stall warning computer decideds that the aircraft is not in a "real" airborne situation and decides not to play ball when the situation actually may be recoverable.
Fortunately, it's not true. Stall warning worked just fine after all airspeed was lost. It has thrown in the towel after AoA exceeded 30°. That's area where no flight test was done before - for a good reason.
Originally Posted by predictorM9
They failed to identify a stall
Despite FWC shouting "STALL STALL STALL". 54 seconds.
Originally Posted by Mac the Knife
So why didn't they look at the attitude indicator/s, which would have shown them to be steeply pitched up?
If we ever get the answer to that, it won't be very palatable.