Originally Posted by
KayPam
Does anyone here know about Norbert Jacquet ?
[...]
I really don't know what to think about all of this
My 2cents, probably worth less: It is fairly simple really, he is either a mentally ill conspiracy theorist, or he is an outstandingly persistent whistle-blower fighting against an entire system including his own lawyers to bring to our attention the dangerous flaws in Airbus' FBW systems (and/or FBW in general).
The problem with the latter view is that FBW Airbuses have been flying now for 30 years and are not obviously falling out of the sky at a greater rate than non-FBW airliners - you can slice and dice the stats a million ways, there is no signal that stands out from the noise or isn't more than covered by correlation with other variables.
It is still possible that FBW has had some effect on safety, good or bad, but there are other far more important things that have happened in the same time frame - EGPWS and TCAS for instance. If choosing flights (as pax) for safety, airline / operator, region and airports may be far more important than A or B (certainly easier to get a idea from the stats) - for instance I personally would avoid Air France before I avoided Airbus...
The most telling thing for me though is that behind all the fuss about airbus fbw, FADECs seemed to sneak in without a murmur. Yet many/most of the arguments against also apply there (e.g. there are 100k+ lines of code in typical FADEC, maybe far more these days, and as far as I know they are the
same lines of code on each engine, and if "computer says no", it don't go - whatever type of thrust levers you have).
Norbert Jacquet seems to have very little to say about FADECs, possibly because he doesn't have that much of a clue, or possibly because Boeing uses them too - doesn't inspire any confidence in his output either way.