Recovery altitude and "touch"
Salute!
If I recall, we determined that the jet was not in a "deep stall" such as the Viper had or the T-tail jets. In other words, the cee gee and center of aero pressure was much like most airplanes.
So I have a hard time thinking it would take more than 10,000 feet to recover.
Granted, I was used to flying at the limits and sometimes over the limits, but I can forgive the basic heavy pilots in that regard.
As PJ has asserted, being smooth and getting the nose back up after reducing the AoA is the key to minimum altitude loss. You can't do this as a "mechanic". You have to have "touch" and be in "touch" with the jet ( I can just see Doze snorting, heh heh). I don't see any way to do this in a sim.
A reliable AoA indication seems a great thing to help you get back to acceptable flight conditions. The FBW implementation on the 'bus appears to have a flaw with regards to AoA. In other words, you can override the "system" and get into the situation that AF447 did. I don't get it. I lost one friend over the desert that buried the nose too far on an attack pass and the gee/AoA limiter gave him the best aero possible but he was just too low/steep. Sierra happens.
I also speak from personal experience in straight wing jets and bent wing ones and deltas. The mach buffet feels different than the stall buffet. One is more of a buzz and the other is more of a "shake". Then there's aileron reversal if it's a mach problem as others have described here about the shock waves.
Go read about Yeager's experience and his use of the horizontal stab. Once supersonic his elevators didn't work, so he manually cranked the stab. Seems an engineer warned him about that possibility( I heard the story directly from Yeager one day in 1979 at the 16th Sqd, First in the F-16) So all the USAF jets after that had the solid horizontal stab that worked for elevator and kept working in the transonic/supersonic regime.
I have to admit that this is a sad story, and I pray that I fly as a SLF with a crew that does more than drag us from DFW to DEN without flying a Citabria every now and then.
Gums