Owain Glydwr, #195
The argument that the A330 system could take the aircraft into stall even "hands off" is a valid one, but really only becomes significant (in AF447 terms) because the aircraft was put in the vicinity of stall in the first place.
That sounds like a serious fault in the design, in that under such circumstances, the effect is a positive feedback loop that might be unexpected, not trained for and thus very difficult to recover from.
This is the point I don't get. The AI system, as I understand it, seeks to maintain a commanded gee in earth axes not body axes as in your Viper. With that assumption the pitch attitude term is a necessary correction feature but not a command.
No info as to where it would get it's acceleration / g info from, but would assume the INS, which has a triad of accelerometers. It wouldn't be enough to just take the G (vertical) value alone, as the value would affected by both pitch and roll. The assumption would be that they are using the processed outputs, via a bit of trig etc, to resolve earth axis vertical from 2 of the 3 accelerometers.
Just edited to add some content, rather than the usual hobby horse criticism about fragile at the edges, which i'm still uncomfortable with :-)...
Keep it up - some of the best techlog/af447 stuff i've seen for months...