In post #1350, smith quoted an opinionated piece:
Don't be surprised if the Airbus fly by wire computers didn't put a perfectly good airplane in the water. In a older generation airplane like the 727 or 737 300/400 the throttles are hooked to the fuel controllers on the engine by a steel throttle cable just like a TBM or a Comanche. On the Airbus nothing in the cockpit is real. Everything is electronic. The throttles, rudder and brake pedals and the side stick are hooked to rheostats who talk to a computer who talks to a electric hydraulic servo valve which in turn hopefully moves something.
Since then I've received the identical message from several different sources, so I took a little time to research & write a rebuttal:
There is much garbage in this...
For example the "Airbus A320 Crash at the Paris Airshow in 1998" is wrong in terms of location, date (a decade off) and causative factors. The facts are totally screwed up; it's written by someone who can't shoot straight. But it is not unusual to receive such summary judgments after any accident.
(That's not to say you won't find Google references to a 1998 Paris airshow crash, but the simple fact is that the Paris Air Show (Salon International de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace, Paris-Le Bourget) is held every other year - in ODD NUMBERED YEARS! )
Further, the implication that cables and pulleys are somehow superior to fly-by-wire ignores the fact that pulleys can jam, cables fray and break, etc. An elevator cable fracture caused a Air Moorea Twin Otter crash (9 August 2007). Northwest Airlines Flight 706 L-188 Electra crashed shortly after takeoff from O'Hare (1961) because an aileron cable failed. Further - I've seen or heard of incidents where an engine could not be shut down, ran away and destroyed itself because of cable-pulley rigging errors.
I agree completely with Sully's statement that they did "what they were trained to do". Sully's shining moment came the instant he decided that any
airport was out of gliding range. The rest was simply doing the job under tough conditions.