Long Thread - lost comments - conclusions.
What you say about going in circles is correct Not so Fantastic. I have just taken the trouble to go through this complete thread - God knows what the phone bill will be - but one thing is for sure - most questions and comments coming at this stage have been handled earlier on.
However three thoughts repeatedly occured to me as I did this scan.
The first is that training for jet upsets is creative training to deal with a worst case situation - including tricks to save an aircraft from a hopeless attitude/speed/rate combination. Was this really the situation in which the Airbus found itself? If it wasn't, then the trained upset inputs were inapropriate in this wake turbulence encounter. Whose fault this was we can't say. Training programes have a habit of being taken on board differently and applied differently by different pilots. Let us learn this lesson when writing future programmes.
The next thing is that use of rudder to correct wing drop is only appropriate in a stalled situation. The reason for it is that use of aileron increases the effective angle of attack on the dropping wing, thus in theory stalling it even more. Depending on the design of the aircraft (washout - tip sweep reduction ) and where and to what extent precisely the wing is stalled, this may or may not be the case. Using the rudder simply to right the ship when the wing is NOT stalled, however, has to be bad advice.
The third thought concerns design. Even the DC-9 family had a rudder limiter, consisting of a horn shaped interference pin fitting into a gap on a traveller directly attached to the rudder. The pin was operated by pitot (dynamic) pressure and was there to allow only appropriate rudder inputs for the engine failure case. If you get the chance, reduce thrust on an engine in cruise to idle and you might be surprised what a very small effect this has on yaw at cruise speed. Thus only a small deflection is required - apart from the fact that the rudder effectiveness increases with speed. The designer was being cautious in giving the pilot the rudder authority he NEEDED to deal with engine failure. It may well be that this authority in certain flight modes would suffice to damage the aircraft if mis-applied in an oscillating sense, for which neither the empennage, nor the rudder has been designed. Again - let us teach our pilots what such use may cause, which is the real reason large jet pilots are not taught, as light aircraft pilots may be, to use rudder in all turn manaoevers.