Originally Posted by
silverstrata
One of the many reasons for this A320 ploughing into the trees was that when they got to 70 or 50 ft, the aircraft pitched down by a couple of degrees to prevent a tail-strike on 'landing'. Good idea if the aircraft was over a runway at the time, but this actually had the effect of pitching the aircraft ever closer to the trees.
Rubbish. Sorry.
(Landing mode was never triggered, protections that would have kicked in were deliberately disabled to compensate for the poor preparation that AF provided the pilots and allow them to shuffle the aircraft into position on the first pass, they ended up too low and slow, the engines spooled down and it was impossible to recover enough thrust to climb out once the mistake was noticed. The only time the computers ever counteracted the pilot's inputs was when those inputs would have caused a stall, because the pilot had taken thrust control away from the computers regardless of the altitude limit - and that's all I'm going to say.)