Why would there be no need for training in hand flying above FL 300?
In AF447, the PF was given the aircraft, as the computer gave up, to hand fly at about FL 350 (from my memory – can’t easily check at present).
Nothing in the thousands of posts on the various AF447 threads, nor anything in the BEA reports AIUI, shows that PF (or PNF for that matter) had ever hand flown at high altitude, for real or in a simulator, at Mach 0.8 or 0.82; nor at slow, close to stall speed at high altitude; and certainly not at a high AoA in a stall.
PF’s movements with the side stick shortly after the incident started caused the PNF to try to persuade him to use less coarse movements and be gentler, which again suggests little or no training in hand flying at high speed and high altitude.
The graphic on one of the AF447 threads shows SS movements described by some as “mixing mayonnaise”, and included pitch commands as well as roll. People have speculated why he ever commanded nose up in the first place, to climb from FL 350 to about 380 – but a very early poster suggested it might have been inadvertent, while trying to do coarse roll inputs. Nobody made a better suggestion that I saw.
PF’s references to “crazy speed” and his persistent holding nose up suggested to some that he confused mach buffet with pre- stall buffet, and high noise with high speed rather than high AoA, which kept him thinking all the way down that he had an overspeed problem.
In my own limited sphere of aviation, I have long been concerned at accidents that happen because “we” thought we were training people well enough, but some accidents showed we were not – people had forgotten, or not known in the first place, things we thought we had taught well. To that, I fear we can add things people thought did not need any tuition – like what being in a fully developed a stall is like, and how to recover from it by hand flying, in an “unstallable” airliner.
(no experience of flying airliners, but interested in safety and training in GA, particularly gliding.)