Machinbird, in re training:
Consider the Perpignan A320 and how throughly the THS overruled the elevator. Different aircraft, but designed by the same team with similar design philosophy.
Yes it is possible to stall the Bus in ALT2 using just elevator and thrust as we saw demonstrated by AF447, but who can say, had the trim had been limited, whether or not the crew would have seen the airspeed come off the peg a bit during one of their nose down trials and continued their nose down efforts.
THS running full nose up is a potential serious hazard and needs to be guarded against better. How to do that is one for the engineers (design type not wrench type) to puzzle out, but judging from what has recently transpired with the type, it may save two or more aircraft in the future. Expecting training to handle the problem completely is not realistic. If we see nothing in BEA's final accident report addressing this problem, then you should be concerned.
The THS can be limited in movement by using the hand wheel in the cockpit. If it goes up too far it can be moved back down to where the pilots want it, since it appears that hands on the wheel overrides anything HAL tells it to do ... at least while the hand is on the wheel.
Some threads ago, one of our Airbus 330 experienced pilots indicated that touching of the trim wheel in some sim training sessions was incentivized
against. (Training note: This looks to fall into the realm of something called negative training, as in not correctly incentivizing a proper course of action, or incentiving against a given course of action).
Yet another Airbus 330 experienced poster here, Mikelour IIRC, described some unusual attitude training he encountered where using the trim wheel was one of the best ways to deal with it, though some crews had to be coaxed into using that resource, see above for possible reasons for that.
There seems to be some professional disagreement within the AB community, and the people who train the crews for various companies, on what is and isn't appropriate use of the trim wheels.
I don't think that changes the response to your concern:
if THS runs amok, you can manage it with your hand. What seems to add joy to this drill is the fact that when you aren't moving the wheel, depending on what HAL has in mind, HAL may move THS on his own cognizance once you reposition it. This point was also made by some of our Airbus veterans.
Good fun, and no sitting on your hands in an Airbus cockpit!
