Rather than taking the CYA position that the crew should have known intuitively what was happening 40 meters behind them in those few critical seconds, would it not maybe make sense to talk about adding some better information for the guys up front? Perhaps a little indicator that pulls together the already available information about the flight envelope and says in red: "TAIL CRITICAL".
Many aircraft and a few helicopters have a SCAS (Stability Control Augmentation System) installed to prevent the overstressing of the aircraft structure. It is obvious that the A-300 did not have such a system. However if it did it seems from the above posts and many others that I have read about the AA A-300 such a system would have been subject to information overload. The SCAS system is only as good as the control laws that are embedded in the SCAS computer. If the control laws did not reflect or consider the information overload during the entry into a highly volatile and disruptive air stream then the system could not cope with the information at hand allowing the pilots to overstress the structure.
A similar occurrence happened several years ago when a US Navy 707 flying over the Olympic Mountains in Washington lost its’ tail in a dive in which the pilot overstressed the vertical fin during the descent.
