Originally Posted by Dozy
The Flight Control Law shouldn't really matter that much. In real terms, Alternate Law means "take extra care with your inputs, as it's now possible to stall your aircraft" and Direct Law means exactly the same with the addition of "...and you have to do the trim yourself". No matter what control law one is in, you should never deflect your stick to the stop unless you've got a damned good reason to do so.
Dozy, as you intimated, mostly the flight control law doesn't matter that much with respect to the way you make your control inputs.
When you start getting into Direct modes such as Alt 2B with Roll Direct, or into full Direct Law that assurance breaks down. If your attention is directed elsewhere (like outside the aircraft or at controlling a roll oscillation) you might well be setting off down a wrong path in controlling your aircraft.
In Bonin's case, he began flying with one set of roll gains expected and experienced a much higher roll gain with lessened damping than he was accustomed to. If the aircraft had the ability to enunciate:
Alternate Law-Roll Direct, right at the A/P drop, that would have helped his situational awareness.
In the XL Airways A320 at Perpignan, that Captain needed to know that his aircraft had dropped to:
Direct Law-Manual Trim in the initial stall, but he was looking out the window at a rapidly rising nose, holding the stick full forward and waiting for the automatic trim to lighten the load on the stick.
Maybe we need an automated Flight Engineer in the Airbus that you can talk to and which will inform us of changes to aircraft status by the verbal channel instead of the highly loaded visual channel. Might help in the Boeing as well.
There is no doubt that the Airbus human interface is eminently flyable, but it could probably be improved.