Originally Posted by HN39
Was he perhaps trying to maintain 15° pitch attitude?
What PF was doing would make better sense if his PFD had a ~ 12 degree pitch bias, but I don't think that happened. Instead, he was probably trying to maintain around 1 g and the harder he tried, the worse his problems became.
Cwatters, your diagram is essentially correct except there wasn't much good aerodynamic data available, so no protections that would have helped. Since they had no idea of Mach number (which affects stall AOA), they didn't even give the AOA system authority to control the aircraft and push the nose down, instead limiting it to shouting, "Stall" repetitively (until silenced by the A/S <60 knots).
Roll however was in Direct law so that was a whole new ball game for PF's level of training.
I am personally of the opinion that other than the airspeed system, the airframe systems performed exactly as designed.
I am not ready to cast PF into the entirely unfit to fly bucket yet. I have this uneasy feeling that many of our weaker brothers in the cockpit would have succumbed to this same scenario, particularly because there is probably something about the total scenario that we do not properly appreciate.
The human factors group at BEA will be having an interesting time if they do their job correctly. I only hope they can explain their understanding adequately.