[quote flinger]There is supposedly an audible enunciation for the switch to alternate law. Furthermore, the aircraft was necessarily in alternate law given the unreliable airspeed indication–and the pilots presumably understood this.[/quote]I didn’t see any indication of the ‘alternate law’ warning going off on anything that was written. Considering that other warnings were going off in the cockpit, it might have been viewed as a distraction. Just the same, I do find that a control system that has an ‘alternate’ behavior to be a bit freaky. The transition between ‘normal’ and ‘alternate’ is not necessarily predictable nor controllable.

The problem I had with Stabilitrak is that it will grab the outside front brake if the tail starts moving out(sliding).. Under some conditions, this is actually the wrong thing to do. I had a problem when driving in Alaska.. where Stabilitrak cut in at the wrong time, making a slight low speed tail out condition worse.. then it decided that it didn’t know what it was doing.. releases the brake and I start to bring the vehicle straight.. then it decides.. “oh yes, I know what to do now”.. and grabs the other front brake.. causing rapid yaw in the opposite direction.. back and forth. I ended up locking up the brakes to stop it. – and yes, I do know how to correct a tail-out slide(doh.. turn into it and don’t touch the brakes)

[quote flinger]The artificial horizon displays the aircraft pitch and roll attitude, not the AoA. This instrument wasn’t necessarily displaying anything catastrophic, even after the plane was hopelessly stalled with a 40° AoA. [/quote]
It would when combined with the altitude indication and ascent/descent indicator. +40° and dropping in altitude makes a pretty convincing case for a stall and high AoA. This is why I got the impression that nobody was really looking at the instruments. The high pitch indicated by the artificial horizon would have also clued the senior pilot into the fact that the junior may have had the control all the way back.

[quote flinger]The static port is located on the fuselage somewhere (certainly on older general aviation aircraft), nowhere near the pitot tube.[/quote] Some have it combined.. port on the front is impact, port on the side is static (pitot-static tube).,see also http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/airplane/pitot.html https://secure.steenaero.com/Store/site/product.cfm?id=B6853D82-102E-BB20-1868CF89D388401B http://store.diydrones.com/product_p/ac-0001-04.htm . In the case of the A330, Static ports are in a different area from the pitot tube and probably weren’t subject to the icing.

[quote flinger]Also, I believe the plane did contact the water in an almost level attitude–but descending at -10,000 feet/min. That is not survivable, and the plane disintegrated on impact.[/quote]I would have to disagree on this. The last thing the junior pilot did @ 2000 feet was to pull all the way back on the stick… again. At 10000f/m, 2000feet equates to more then 10 seconds. Enough to change orientation. Tail contacting hard, whipping the front down and a huge bending moment on the fuselage would cause tearing on the bottom of the fuselage with disintegration aided by forward motion relative to water hitting the tears in the fuselage. Realize that the landing on the Hudson (flight 1549), the plane was doing close to 120mph forwards.. or 10,560ft/min. The forward motion is likely to twist the wings and try to pull the nose down as the engines first make contact with the water (which is more like a solid at 120mph).