First I would like to express my gratitude to all the usual sciolistic reaction eliciters, who unfazed by repeated warnings their pet theories suffer from disconnection from reality, keep on providing some comic relief in this sombre thread. Then there are some pretty well-meant suggestions that, alas, are founded in misunderstanding of aerodynamics, flight controls, airliner operation and aviation psychology. All in all, I'd estimate that less than third of the posts around here contain anything that can be useful in understanding the QZ8501 crash - which is pretty normal for PPRuNe.
Regarding the issue of FBW Airbi not having stickshaker, estimate whether the aeroplane possesses sufficient natural pre-stall buffet and therefore require artificial stall warning system is left to development and certification test pilot and is somewhat subjective, yet the tests on 330s and 340s in the wake of AF447 have shown them to shake wildly before stall and it can be also seen on recently posted A320 video. Anyway, fact that aeroplanes were stalled with shakers & pushers operating was repeatedly stated on this thread. On the subject of automatic stall recovery, CONFiture has rightly pointed out it could present danger in itself if warning is unwarranted and that's why stick pushers have to be overridable (read the HTBJ, folks). Even for human pilot, stall warning isn't call to push mindlessly but to gather one's wits, realize aircraft energy state and do appropriate actions - which more often than not will be (approach to) stall recovery. Two widebodies were lost to overreaction to false stall alarm but it is easy for Joe PPRuNer to gloss over them;
TWA 843 resulted in no casualties while
Kenya Airways 430 happened in Africa.
"Protections" are possible because the system is digital and as we all know, anything that can be imagined can also be done with digital signals.
True, up to a point. Hard protections were indeed made technically and commercially feasible by the introduction of digital FBW but soft envelope limiting, similar to ones on B777 and called "Flight Augmentation", was available on early Airbus widebodies and Fokkers 100. As none of these were selling exceptionally well, there was no commercial pressure to defame such a system as "unnatural", "taking control from pilot" and "potentially unsafe".
How many serviceable large jet a/c stalled & crashed before FBW, and how many since?
Seemingly "classical" jets keep stalling & crashing even after FBW was introduced (Amsterdam, Comoros, Mali..) but the metric of how many is just plain wrong. Somewhat better would be how many per number of flights or how many per flight hour and with aviation expansion we have, statistical conclusion is overwhelmingly in favor of:
We are doing very good job of teaching pilots how not to stall the aeroplane.
IMHO, Peekay4 (thanks for the comments on Elmendorf catastrophe, I wasn't aware it was another stick-back-until-impact crash) and Unworry's nephew are on the right track. We are dealing here with pilots rejecting skills they were supposed to learn before first solo and some of them were extremely experienced so no amount of training or experience we provide today can change this. Of interest to me is dynamics of spatial disorientation in multicrew cockpits. We are not dealing with the amounts of G and angle rates of tactical jets so it's harder for us to get to get disoriented yet again facts of the accident fly in the face of the notion that if one pilot gets his vertical gyro between the ears toppled, the other will come to rescue. It seems almost as if disorientation is contagious. In most of the similar accidents so far, captain was PF so we could take some solace in notion it was about command authority gradient yet here very experienced captain failed to perform recovery (or any decisive action at all) so it's back to square one for HF research.