Originally Posted by
Volume
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.
This may be a little unfair on the crew. They were well below the tops of the storms that they were in close proximity to. They could have been in IMC in surrounding small cells that may not show on weather radar. They could have been in a dark grey goldfish-bowl with severe turbulence and no visual reference. Add in lightning flashes from below and above and ECAM playing all the alert alarms, possibility that the aircraft dropped out of Normal Law unnoticed with everything else going on - and you have a recipe for
complete cognitive overload.
Perhaps someone could use a military style full motion simulator that can give +/- relatively high G, but with modern aircraft cockpits - both A and B - and then put the HF engineers, pilot SMEs and designers in the cockpit and replay some known incidents like AFR447 etc., so that they understand the problems they can cause. There are times when letting multiple subsystems shout urgently to the crew is totally counterproductive.