@Lyman : Based on what evidence?
The discrepancy we're talking about here is relatively minute. Even if the tendency hadn't been corrected for the widebodies, you'd be looking at hours and hours of flight between AP disconnect at 35,000ft and reaching 38,000ft - the time it would take is certainly more flight hours than AF447 had remaining, and it would have had to escape the attention of the crew over that period of time.
In the AF447 case, from autoflight disconnect to impact is a matter of minutes. The sidestick deflection (measured at source) is consistent with the flight trajectory - ergo the evidence strongly implies that the climb, stall and subsequent actions were due to crew input.
Autotrim is commanded based on flight control position over time (i.e. a trend) - whether the elevators are currently deflected or not.
@CONF iture:
Alpha protection is a systems procedure triggered based on a variable derived from Alpha Max - the point at which it triggers is not a hard-coded value, but a function. The hard protections are implemented by a subsystem that operates outside the main flight control logic. Upon loss of Normal Law, that subsystem is inhibited. The reason the protection fires just shy of Alpha Max itself is to take into account conditions whereby Alpha Max is on the edge of the flight envelope that cannot be reliably measured by the system (e.g. tailwind).
Last edited by DozyWannabe; 31st Aug 2012 at 20:28.