Originally Posted by
PENKO
Quagmire, again you are putting the cart in front of the horse. Sully did not get those few extra degrees from his Airbus because the Airbus was doing its best not to stall due to Sully's control inputs. You can't first run out of speed, forcing the aircraft in to protect mode and then still expect the aircraft to give you a few extra degrees of pitch for free. A 737 would stall and crash.
The only interesting part in this debate/investigation is that Sully was not aware of the fact that he was in alpha protect. He was not aware how critically low his speed was, probably due to the human factor issues of Ditching in the Hudson. That is something to take away with from this ditching! It could happen to anyone.
That's just not true.
alpha max is 17.5 in conf 2.
The max angle of attack that was reached was 15°.
Alpha max in itself includes a margin as well.
So there was more than enough margin.
Sully was probably aware of how low his speed was, thanks to the appropriate information on the PFD (speed trip with orange/red colouring), but maybe he actually wanted to have a forward speed as low as possible.