Franzl,
A very pertinent series of points.
I suspect the "unload" term may be strange to those who have never flown tactical aircraft. It literally means to take the load off of the wings (which puts you into a ballistic trajectory).
It is usually not absolutely necessary to perfectly hit zero g to unload.
One tenth of a g keeps things planted on the floor and is thus a safer thing to do when carrying passengers.
Example:
If your aircraft has a 180 knot clean stall speed at 1 g, then your stall speed at .1 g will drop to 57 knots. Very useful for maintaining control of the wing attitude (even though you are on a ballistic trajectory).
Airtren's comments re the Interflug A310 Incident, near Moscow, in 1991
allowed me to find the following youtube posting which makes a whole range of relevant points among which I find the comments regarding the problems with keeping the pilots in the loop while the computers fly the aircraft to be particularly relevant to AF447.
Blackbox - 05 - Blaming the Pilot - Part 5 of 5 - YouTube