Originally Posted by
Machinbird
Dozy
What ran the trim up at the stall was the Airbus trying to effectively hold an attitude and being unable to do so without adding more THS trim.
Who really knows why the PF decided the nose needed to be 15 degrees up, but the aircraft was trying to make it happen.
It "tried" to hold that attitude because that was the attitude commanded and *held*. You can't have it both ways - heaven knows the FBW Airbus has come in for some stick for "limiting" pilot input - in this case it was doing exactly as it was told, as would any other aircraft.
In Alternate law, it appears that all use of AOA is discarded. No doubt the engineers had their reasons, but I would be real interested in knowing what they were.
Because Alternate Law is by definition a degraded systems status. Any and all stability protection in Alternate is "soft" and as such can be overridden by pilot input, because the design assumes that the pilot knows more than the systems at that point. Even if AoA protection was operative in Alternate Law, the PF's inputs continued to demand nose-up for the majority of the way down and would have overridden it.
The rules in a crisis situation are Aviate, Navigate, Communicate in that order, and whether through poor training or otherwise, this crew sadly failed at the first hurdle. Regardless of the THS angle, all that needed to happen was for one of them to push the nose down in response to the Stall Warning alarm that was going off for nearly a minute and the result would have been a scary ride for the passengers and coffee without croissants for the flight crew after landing in Paris.