Originally Posted by
misd-agin
You can move the throttles an inch, or a fraction of an inch, if you so desire. But you bring up an interesting point - throttle/thrust lever travel and relative sensitivity. We can use manual thrust and should always verify, by checking the N1 gauges, what the response was. The only time that's inappropriate is once you're very low and about to, or in, the flare. I switching from Boeing to AB and caught a nasty sink rate just prior to touchdown with relatively low time on the AB. I used muscle memory to push the AB thrust levers up....WHOA!....too much power! Landed ok and made the somewhat tight midfield turnoff (no parallel taxiways). The amount of power I had received based on the throttle movement threw me off. I think the Boeing throttles gave less power per inch/degree of travel vs the AB thrust levers. Or put another way, the AB engines give more power for the same amount of throttle/thrust lever travel. I base that observation on more time in the aircraft using manual thrust and from measuring the throttle/thrust lever travel on the Boeing 737 vs Airbus 320. I wonder if anyone knows the actual answer? (TDracer??).
I'm afraid I don't know much about the Airbus thrust levers - other than they are short and don't move very far as compared to Boeing. I am familiar with most of the Boeing thrust levers - although the 737 is the exception. The 757/767 forward thrust levers are 12.25 inches long (axis of rotation to center of the knob), and have an angular travel of 56 degrees (except the 767-400, which uses the 777 levers). Going strictly to FADEC meant the thrust levers could be made a little smaller with less travel, since you didn't need to account for the cable backlash and lost motion, so the 747-400/-8 and 777 use similar levers, 11.25 inches long and 50 degrees of angular travel. Due to an FAA mandate, the 787 uses a completely different thrust lever assembly than the 777 (really, really dumb in my opinion - the 777 thrust lever module was the best Boeing ever did, far better than the POS they ended up with on the 787 - which is sadly also going to used on the 777X) - but the 777 and 787 are dimensionally similar. I believe the 737 NG levers are similar to the 777, but I don't know specifics, and I'm reasonably sure the thrust levers on the MAX are unchanged from the NG.
In all cases, there is ~2 degree 'flat' at both ends (takeoff and idle) to insure slight miss-rigging won't affect the ability to get either takeoff power or idle. Max climb power is always at about 80% of the forward thrust lever travel.