Airbus hand-flying characteristics

[hikoushi]

Hello!

Since you folks here always seem to have the answers, I have a question for you. A few, really.

I've been flying the 717 for about 4 years and am just about to start training on the A330. Finally bit the bullet and decided to go take a crack at the big French whale. Looking forward to it immensely, and in the meantime enjoying the last few months of honest flying in an honest airplane. Which brings up the question.

What the hell does it feel like to physically fly the stupid thing? I mean, let's say you have the autothrust OFF and the autopilot OFF. You are level at say, 10,000 feet at 250 knots. You pull the throttles to IDLE without touching the sidestick. What does it do? In every aircraft I've flown up to this point, which includes the 717 as well as a smattering of various regional airline and GA planes prior, the plane will drop it's nose and ATTEMPT to capture it's trimmed airspeed, and enter a descending phugoid of some kind while trying to sort itself out. Instead of letting it bob around drunkenly, we apply a few gentle "guiding" nudges of pressure and maybe a small trim change will establish a flight-idle descent at that same speed.

I understand that in Normal Law the sidestick basically commands a load factor, or "G" request (I haven't hit ground school yet so stop me if I'm wildly wrong at any point). Does that mean that the Airbus, if I idled the throttles without touching the stick (A/P and A/THR OFF) that instead of dropping the nose, the plane would try to maintain 1 g by holding altitude and bleeding off speed until it hit Alpha Floor (or whatever the hell that is called), or would it pitch down like a "normal" airplane and just do so very gently and precisely while staying close to 250? What does it do? I am again talking all manual hand flying here. Is it maintaining flight path vector, or airspeed if you move the thrust levers around without moving the stick?

Also, again, stupid question here. I am hand flying the airplane in level flight with the autothrust off. I select (I believe you call it) open descent / FLCH at 250 knots. I pull the throttles to idle and pitch down for the flight director. Airplane stabilizes in the descent. I let go of the stick. I push the throttles forward about halfway without touching anything else. What happens? Does the airplane make any pitch adjustments to maintain the selected airspeed, or does it maintain it's attitude and flight path, and let the speed increase? Again, this is with everything OFF.

Just curious about how the airplane actually FLIES. Will get all the deep technical stuff in the schoolhouse when the time comes, just really curious how the airplane behaves itself when you actually try to physically fly it like an airplane. Don't care about behaviour with degraded control laws, etc; will get to that once I get my head unplugged re: normal law handling characteristics.

Specifically referring to the A330 here, but assuming it is the same for all Airbus models, so please chime in. Thank you in advance!