Hi Clandestino,
I have to make very long&imprecise shot here: I suppose that in former life you were jealous of Bitburg based Ego drivers, with right hand gloves that didn't show wear at thumb.
I have a chuckle on this one, like it actually. I still have some left hand gloves in good shape and missing the right ones with holes in the thumb.
I was flying in the backseat of an F15 double seater 1990 in a low level mission, and didnīt even recognize its autotrimming.
But to make my position clear: I stated several times and do it again here, i have nothing at all against a fine autotrim system. So its a bit unfair of you to put blame on me for not recognizing the advantages of FBW and its asociated systems.
There! You have effectively answered yourself; autotrim is good thing as long as one know how it works, applicable to any aeroplane system and one is required to know that by air law and the basic DNA-ingrained law of self preservation. With AF447 crew it was not just that they forgot about autotrim - they never verbalized what in the hell they thought was going on and what they thought they should do, indicating the rabbit-in-the-headlights defence posture. In the end, what CM2 did with the stick is what killed them. Investigation did not find a single reason why trim would go AND if only stick were pushed forward.
I agree with that, never did otherwise, and i knew somebody would jump on it. My concern is not about blame (neither to the pilots nor to the airframe), but about prevention. This trimsystem can be improved in the mentioned area without decreasing its overall performance, thus eliminating one hole in the different layers of cheese.
Why not talk about it and why not work on a change? Is it pride or neglicence, costs or arrogance which keeps us from recognizing, that there was a crew who was obviously not familiar with the behaviour of the aircraft despite their training, their hours of experience and their legal licences? Im pretty sure, there are others out there who learned a lot out of this accident and try to improve their knowledge base, but others will not and will never and might fall to the same situation.
Why not improve the autotrim system? There are accidents (not this one alone) where a correct functioning autotrim, not understood by the crew, contributed to the outcome of the happening. That should tell us not only that knowledge and training has to be improved, but that we also should improve the system to prevent that such misinterpretations proliferate into full accidents.
The statement, that they shouldnīt have got in this situation beforehand is correct, but it is not the way to look at the things in accident investigation and accident prevention and in view of flight safety. The task is not to close the hole in the first layer of cheese, but to take care of all known holes.