Dozy
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.
I don't want to get off topic here, but as you well know that was disputed by Captain Asseline and his team of lawyers. What they said, is that there WERE computer inputs and overrides to the pitch demand, which were unexpected and not explained.
Quote:
The EFCS responded to "stick-back'' with "nose-down''. This is clear from the DFDR listings appended to the final report. Asseline suggests three hypotheses to explain this:--
i) On descending through 50ft, the EFCS had (unknown to the crew, who thought they were at 100ft), entered "landing mode''. At 30ft, the EFCS would then have begun its "derotation'' as for a normal landing. This hypothesis is rejected by the final report, on the grounds that, by the time the radio altitude was below 30ft, alpha was 14.5 degrees, and high AOA protection would be in force and would take priority. This statement in turn is disputed by Sandall [SANC91A], since, assuming that the official timings are 4s in error, descent below 30ft first occurred at least 8 seconds before impact, when alpha was well below 14.5 degrees.
ii) There was a supplementary limitation on angle of attack in landing mode, not published in the FCOM, intended to prevent a tail-strike during landing (which would require a 14 degree limit).
iii) EFCS software failure.
Unquote.
Extracted from:- Mellor P.: "CAD: Computer-Aided Disaster'', High Integrity Systems Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2, 1994.
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