P.S. I wish these idiot "big red auto-off button" proponents would stop and think. Do they really imagine any manufacturer is going to provide full mechanical backup to something the size of an A380?
That is being dishonnest ...
Transmitting control input by mechanical means, by fluid or by wire is not the problem. Providing raw airspeed, or computed airspeed is not the problem.
The problems arises when a computer has its own way of flying the airplane, disregarding pilot inputs. The problems arises when computed airspeeds are used by computers to "manage" the airplane, their ways ...
And finally, the problems arise when the pilots fly the computer laws instead of flying the airplane law, when pilots are selected and trained to fly computers, not to fly airplanes.
In this accident, as far as we know, after the recovery from the first stall :
- either the trim was stuck at 11° "up" (and the reasons are either mechanical or computer related),
- or the pilots failed to trim forwards in a situation any presolo student pilot would recognize as requiring immediate forward trim.
Any one here made a balked landing go-around at full flaps in a C 172? Or any airplane without auto trim?
Well ... the crew had a lot of time in airbi, and during normal operation, they never - never - had to use the manual trim wheel ... And all of a sudden, that airbus (designed to be flown by a doorman ...) stopped to work as usual ... in a most stressfull situation!
Well, we may think that the crew, having entered an unexpected stall at low altitude - due to computer misbehaviour - was quite stressed ... and that means that they lost a good part of their intellect.
So they kept pushing the stick forwards, expecting to control the pitch attitude "as usual" ... while the computers had changed their minds about auto trim. The aircraft performed a chandelle ... and quite naturally, in such a stressfull situation, the pilots forgot to use that trim wheel ...
So the aircraft entered a ballistic parabolla before going totally out of hands ...
Gives us pilots, intelligent pilots, pilots trained to hand fly an aircraft ...