Originally Posted by
henra
Simply levelling off and then letting the stick go should have helped until a speed of ~Mach 0,65 (Figure 65 in the report). After that even at level attitude the FCS would have started to trim into the stall once the propulsive limit had been exceeded.
I'd like to see an experiment proving that before we make a definitive call - at this juncture we're into systems behaviour as yet untested, and unless we have someone from Airbus to confirm or refute that theory, your guess is as good as mine.
At that point sustained ND input would have been required.
Which is, after all, the correct response to recover from the onset of stall and has been since aircraft were made out of wood, doped fabric and twine.
Originally Posted by
jcjeant
That of the Airbus system (hold the trim in up position when knowing this was a continuous stall)
Ah, but the flight control computers are not programmed with the concept of stall and to the best of my knowledge never have been.
The stall warning parameters are encoded into the annunciator system, but the flight control computers are oblivious to stall in Alternate Law - and most would say rightly so, because for the computers to be able to override the human when in a degraded state would open the aircraft's safety to significant risk if the computers get it wrong
(not to mention the fact that the backlash from the Airbus-sceptic brigade would be deafening if this were the case!).
The point is that outside of Normal Law, the systems are designed to defer to the pilot's inputs - no matter what those inputs are - for better or worse. This is based on the reasonable assumption that the human pilot will have a much better ability to adapt to circumstance than the computer ever could. In this case the crew were clearly overwhelmed and not only made mistakes, but repeated the same mistakes over and over again with tragic consequences.