Originally Posted by
eagle21
The protections did not “fail”on the Iberia Bilbao accident. The aircraft behaved as designed at the time. The ELACs did not like the rate of pitch change and in anticipation of high nose event limited it. Airbus modified the ELAC standard after the incident and provided Iberia with a new A319. All details on the final report.
They didn't fail, they worked as designed, but they failed the crew. It's funny you can use the same word in English for two slightly different concepts. They failed the crew.
The mere fact that they decided to change/improve the law, shows that they admit that it was not perfect.
In the end, and what matters, the bad design of the protection led to an accident.
The exact origin of this bad design, be it coding, mechanical failure, electrical failure, freezing, does not really matter. The protection unduly limited legitimate stick orders and led to an accident.
Hence they failed. They failed at doing their job properly.
Airbus talks about cases of "i
mproper AoA protection activation".
If you think an activation leading to an accident was proper.. Good on you. Stop thinking that anything designed by the manufacturer is perfect.