I am still struggling to fully understand what we can see in the pictures.
The outside pictures quite obviously do show the fuselage skin forward of the aft pax door, and the VTP (you can see the "i-dot" of "Air").
For the internal picture I am still unsure what we can see.
Does this image help:
No, it is an A300 picture...
The item on the left side looks like a bleed air duct wrapped in insulation material (APU bleed line), the milled part is round on the left edge, so it can not be part of the HTP spar box, it looks more like an upper VTP attachment frame, the fitting is too long to be the trim actuator fitting. On the left side it looks like a lot of wires and connectors.
And for the other Airbus discussion...
Without the driver input the assist would not be in use at all.
100% correct. The stabilizer trim will never do something without a pilot input (either to the computers or via sidestick or trim switch) triggering this action, however....
the AF447 trim was caused by excessive and prolonged stick back pilot input for a few minutes.
This is wrong.
My point was that pulling the stick back for 4 minutes is what took down AF447.
This is wrong as well. Please have a look at the available FDR data first. What triggered the trim movement was several short nose up inputs during a time during which the main inputs were left-right. The 4 minutes of stick back (a shorter, but still extremely long time even full back) were applied
after the trim had already reached the full nose up stop, when basically all was done already, and the nose was even dropping below the horizon, which can somehow explain why full nose up inputs were given at that time. This does not mean, the systems brought down this plane, of course it was the pilot doing unbelievable errors in understanding the situation and steering the plane ignoring all procedures and hand flying basics. But he was not acting as stupid as it sometimes is stated in an enormously simplified version of the event.
For the time being I can see no link between both cases, except that it happened over water with severe thunderstorm activity in the area. But this time it was early dusk, not pitch dark night. I find it highly unlikely that similar attitude deviations remain unnoticed if you have some outside reference. I find it highly unlikely that a climb was not noticed, when such climb was requested but explicitly disapproved by ATC.