Lyman,
Why would the boffins select a climb, at all, in the first place? So why not 0 degrees and no power increase, or even a reduction in Thrust.
On the A-330, there are 4 thrust lever indents:
- Idle
- Max climb
- Max continuous/flex
- TOGA
As they were cruising at Mach 0.82, 35K, A/T on, the engine N1s were 100% and lever position was in Max climb. It's the way the aircraft works.
Now, when they began to experience turbulence, they manually reduced the speed to Mach 0.80 and the engine N1s reduced to 85%.
Then the event started A/P followed by A/T shut off and they received a warning of "Thrust Lock, move the thrust levers" which they eventually did. Just because the thrust levers are in the Max climb indent does not mean the aircraft will climb like a rocket, at least not at 35K or at a 85% N1. So they weren't boffins at that point. Now if you recall, when the A/P came off, the nose went down and the plane started to bank to starboard and the pilot flying manually tried to make a correction to get the nose up and get the wings level. But, his touch was heavy attempting to do both and we know what resulted.
We have been through this pitch and power settings many times. A pitch setting of anywhere between 2.5 - 5.0° nose up would have worked and the N1 at 85% to maintain Mach 0.80 would have provided time to get out the accurate pitch and power settings base on aircraft weight.
But they didn't do that, yet they knew they had "crazy speeds" which should have lead to the UAS process defined above.
I would not think reducing power and going down would be the thing to do as the speed would rapidly increase leading to a speed-speed warning.
There are times when following directions that, or should be, the basis of the word "Aviate" are really important. This was one of those times. Now the other 33 or so crews that experienced UAS problems didn't follow the exact directions either, but they knew how to aviate and all turned out well.
On another note, he confessed a low level of familiarity with Alternate Law, and he had never heard of alternate Law, 2b....Don't get me wrong, this guy retired off the triple 7, and his skill was at the highest level.
Well, to me, this is, for lack of a better word, scary! Regardless of an Airbus or a 777, both can go into degraded laws with loss of various protections that would be nice to know, being a pilot flying, should it suddenly happen.