Well, this is entirely speculative and unsubstantiated! It is only one of a number of reasonable explanations of why the PF almost-instantly pitched the aircraft up to an attitude that, in a transport aircraft at cruise altitude, I still find frightening, and like everyone else I'm just trying to explain/understand. Greatly-reduced damping effects of much thinner air in high altitude flight requires that one be very gentle with the airplane, just like Davies* says. It is no wonder that the stall warning blipped twice, as the AoA at which the stall warning occurs (in Alternate and Direct Laws only) is between 1 and 2 degrees higher than cruise flight AoA's.
Aircraft inertia will continue the physical trajectory of the mass and "fly through" any immediate response by the aircraft to increased lift resulting from an increase in pitch and thus the AoA increases in any such swift changes in pitch, here, to the point of triggering a couple of stall warnings.
Frankly, while such handling is an abuse of the airplane which exhibits a lack of understanding of high altitude flight it's no big deal because the airplane isn't stalled. But none of this explains the continued pull on the stick after the stall warning continued sounding. Any response should have been a full-forward stick to achieve about a 12 to 15 degree nose-down attitude to unstall the airplane...that results in a descent rate of around 15,000fpm.
When the speed begins to increase indicating exit from the stall, a very gentle pull on the stick is required to avoid another high AoA resulting from the higher positive g's during recovery and subsequent second entry into the stall.
This is, or should be, all pretty basic stuff, thus the questions surrounding the continued pull. I think the confusion surrounding the ceasing of the stall warning and then its reappearance is understandable but the extremely high descent rate and unwinding altimeter, (the (older) standby altimeter was going around the dial once every 2 seconds in the sim), should be sufficient to have indicated a fully-stalled aircraft but they only realized that at around FL100 or so.
It's all been thoroughly discussed in seven previous lengthy threads but sometimes a review is helpful.
Owain Glyndwr;
Thank you for this reminder...I fully agree with you that a 5deg pitch attitude (about 2.5deg above normal cruise pitch) is not itself a problem, (I had originally thought and had posted that it was but again learned and changed my views!).