Originally Posted by
twistedenginestarter
I was trained to fly over 50 years ago. That involved the Trident. It had a yaw damper - a computer system to counter the basic instability of the aeroplane. Aircraft that require computers are nothing new.
Sure. All swept wing airliners are susceptible to dutch rolls and require yaw dampers. The 707 had one in all models.
Several people have implied it's perfectly OK for fighters to be unstable but not airliners. I simply can't see the logic in this.
In case you really are serious:
For fighters, maneuverability is supremely important, and maximum maneuverability can only be obtained with relaxed aerodynamic stability. That additional safety layer has been dispensed with in fighters to increase their effectiveness as machines of war. Military transport aircraft are as stable as civil airliners. Airliners might be made a bit more efficient by relaxed stability, but that tradeoff is not appropriate when carrying passengers for whom being killed is not part of the everyday risk.
The fighters, as flown by the pilots, are completely stable, it's just all computer-assisted. Unlike airliners, most modern fighter jets would literally break apart (depending on the speed) and fall out of the sky should all flight control computers fail (as would the B2, but the reason is the stealth-shape, which is much easier to obtain with relaxed stability). So if anything you'd want them to be
more reliable than in aerodynamically stable transport aircraft (civil or otherwise).
The ironic thing is Airbus take the opposite view - for the most part they take the model that the computers should be involved in all manoeuvring actions. As we know, a similar clash between computers and pilots on an A320 ( XL888T) caused a crash but everybody seems to accuse Boeing of inventing this kind of scenario.
You seem to have missed that all Boeing airliners (and Embraer, and Bombardier) since and including the 777 have been 100% fly-by-wire. It isn't an Airbus thing. I also don't know why you would call it "ironic".
Also, the XL Airways Crash in Perpignan was very different. Yes, two faulty AoA sensors were a causal factor, but it crashed because the pilots deliberately stalled it at very low altitude, testing the protection system which they blindly believed would save them, but which wasn't working because of the frozen AoA sensors. It was overreliance on automation (and also poor planning and execution of flight tests), but it has nothing to do with computers fighting against humans or any such nonsense. Quite the opposite. It crashed because the computers were not able to save the pilots from themselves. Which a perfectly fine airplane would have done.
Bernd