Great point(s) Vessbot
You guys seem really wedded to the definition of "deep stall" being limited to the particular blanked stabilizer phenomenon in T-tails. Or otherwise diminished pitch authority. Fine, I'll live with it. Nevertheless, this airplane was very deeply stalled.
And Turbine D, there's no need to act like an
about it.
Years ago, like thread 5 or 7 or 9, I tried to make the point that the 'bus must have nice stability and low buffet when at a high AoA. So defeating any of the remaining "protections" ( God, how I hate what that term implies) by holding a nose up command as the speed rapidly decreases makes for a "smooth" stall entry and except for the degraded roll control laws the sucker just sits there happy and descending at 10,000 feet per minute.
I can understand that the crew could not readily accept that they were deeply stalled. Ask a "delta" pilot like me in my early years, of any type - F-102, Mirage, F-106, Vulcan, Concorde, and so on. Very smooth transiton from lift to no lift and plenty drag and vertical velocity you do not want. My recollections of the Deuce was it had a "buzz", but no wing rock or buffet that I had in the other 3 or 4 planes I flew. But the bottom fell out on short final if you pulled back a lot with low power. So I cut some slack for the crew recognizing their stall entry, but only a little. Lack of understanding the confusing degraded control laws and failure to just hold whatever control inputs were there when the aero sensors went tits up and the AP kicked out did not help at all. Lastly, as CONF pointed out, the THS trimming while in a backup mode was the icing on the cake.
I am not gonna demand all the newer folks here go back thru the thousands of posts where we dissected this terrible crash, but maybe using the "search" features one could see "deep stall", "longitudinal stability", control law regression, and many more aspects of the crash.