Originally Posted by
aircarver
Did the autopilot stall the airplane on bad airdata before it clicked off and handed over to the pilots
No - in fact it's for that very reason that the values are constantly compared and the AP will disengage if there's a discrepancy. The aircraft did not stall until it reached the apogee of the zoom climb, at which point it had been under manual control for almost a minute.
or did the PF immediately imply an overspeed, and stall it with the long period of stick back ?
That's the big question, and judging by the content of the final report there's not enough clear-cut information to provide a definitive answer there. Instead what we have is a series of possibilities, each of which has to be eliminated. Those giving the report short shrift because it does not provide a definitive answer are missing the point - it's not the fault of the investigators, it's that there was insufficient information available to provide a simple answer.
For one thing, I don't think it's a coincidence that a push for flight-deck CCTV monitoring began around the time the final report was being compiled.
Originally Posted by
rudderrudderrat
Why thank you. I feel compelled to admit I wasn't the only one pointing that out, however.
That said, I don't think the FDs alone were the cause of the PF's pitch-up commands*, just as I don't think fear of overspeed or expectation of being able to rely protections would do it in isolation. I suspect it was a combination of any or all of those factors and possibly more.
This is what irks me about some of the criticisms of the report in this thread - because if the accusations of the BEA trying to protect Airbus and AF by pinning it on the crew were true, they could easily have taken a look at the probable FD behaviour, stated that the crew contravened procedure, stalled and crashed the aircraft and left it there.
Instead what we have is a fairly exhaustive review of all the possible factors that led to the accident, inclusive of shortcomings on the part of the manufacturer, operator and the industry as a whole - there's even a whole section devoted t othe handling of the recovery operation and how to rectify mistakes made there. While there's a lot of material dedicated to how the crew mishandled the situation, the findings and conclusions only relate that factually. The implicit reprimands seem to be largely directed at the industry as a whole.
[* - The reason for this is that we don't know precisely when they re-appeared, how long they re-appeared for, we only have a theory on what they might have displayed based on systems behaviour - and probably most importantly, if the PF even saw them when they did re-appear on each occasion that they did. On its own it's an interesting rather than compelling theory, but in concert with everything else working against the crew it's definitely something that needs to be eliminated in future.]