The plane refused to deliver alpha max, it kept 2.5 deg short of it.
I'm genuinely ignorant about the details of what the aircraft would deliver in different circumstances.
Did it deliver alpha that was 2.5 deg less than alpha max in order to avoid pushing too close to the limit? I.e. is that 2.5 degrees a safety margin in the software?
I can find the BEA report in French, and can't translate accurately enough to tell.
I did find an interesting site where there's photos of someone carrying away the blackboxes -
AirDisaster.Com: Investigations: Air France 296. The site claims that the white stripes on the DFDR box in pictures No. 3 and No. 4 are different, when in fact they look identical to me.