if the pilot had pushed forward for long enough
How much is long enough?
see FDR at 2:12:32 to 2:12:42. Bonin pitched down +4 deg but elevator never passed -15 deg. Commonsense says that 10 sec. is more that enough for a crew in distress.
(XL888), autotrim is off and all THS movement must be ordered by the pilot via the trim wheels.
see
http://www.icas.org/ICAS_ARCHIVE/ICA...PAPERS/605.PDF
***quote
When the airplane enters a stall, the load factor and the pitch rate feedback responses tend to fall off, due to lift loss and nose-down pitching moment. Consequently, the elevator is more and more driven nose-up, due to integration of the increasingly large C error, in particular, if a nose-up stick input is maintained. Operation of the automatic stabilizer trim function will exacerbate this condition to the point where both the elevator and the horizontal stabilizer can end up on the nose-up stop, unless the pilot reverses his stick input early enough to overpower the adverse C feedback error and drive the elevator to a nose-down position.
these characteristics may have played a role in the two accidents, making recovery from any full blown stall for a C or CU based FBW design difficult, even for experienced test pilot
The pilot’s awareness of the horizontal stabilizer position is of crucial importance to flight safety, especially when the automatic stabilizer function is suddenly lost in flight conditions close to the edge of the envelope***
Therefore, the options are:
- more and more recurrent training for pilots, make them supermen
- redesign of the trim wheels for more visual awareness, maybe color spectrum from up to down pitch, with blinking amber for MAN Pitch mode or extreme positions
However, I still believe that the implementation of the line of code posted previously is a feasible option for the issue.
Sometimes, the cowboy style is the best option.